Exile from the Labyrinth: the Lament Configuration
by Ellen Weaver
Summary: In 1965, Doctor Phillip Channard acquires a unique patient at the Radamanthus Asylum, an inhuman, magical creature thrown into a mortal Hell by unseen forces. What follows is a deadly contest of strength and sanity and will between the sadistic psychiatrist and his fae prisoner. (Trigger warning: this story contains psychological cruelty and traumatic sequences.)
1. The Prisoner in the Box

**August 1965**

A man hung naked in a padded box, suspended from a nail of glass, his face a rictus of despair.

Of course he was a man. Of course. What else could he possibly be?

In the second glance, however, from the sliding judas-gate of steel in the steel door that divided them, Dr. Channard was reassured. The patient—_the prisoner_, his inner voice insisted—was indubitably male, well-formed in his body, no sign of malnutrition or injury other than the lesions on his wrists and upper breastbone, and a great black bruise across one temple, fading into garish purple-red of his black eye. The pupil of this eye was greatly dilated, reminding Channard uncannily of the liquid-tar eyes of barn owls. He made a note on the clipboard to have the patient's problematic physical injuries treated—the two bruises on his forearm, wad-and-taped, were from the IV drip and sedative, and were already noted on the form. The slot in the bottom of the door was clogged with the tatty pyjamas and institutional meal-tray lunch that had been left inside the small padded room for when the patient woke, as if the door had vomited them out in disgust.

The nail of glass was only the way the wire-protected light reflected off the patient's hair, clipped close around his skull. He watched the patient watching him, became momentarily self-conscious. "How are we today?" Channard asked, the pattern of unctuous doctor-patient language.

The patient—_the prisoner_—took a step forward, the look in his uncannily mismatched eyes so fearsome that Channard had to resist flinching back. His foot slipped momentarily in the mess of rejected cotton, bologna, and chocolate pudding. And then he was there, looking out through the mullioned metal grating, no less than a handspan from Channard's face. His face now was pleasant, ironically friendly.

"You will unlock this door and let me go," the man-_a man?_-said, casually, as if discussing the weather. "You will do this now, and I will attempt to forgive the triple insult done to my person."

There was something about the timbre of the voice, the unmistakable ring of authority, that first provoked Channard to actually lift his hand to the lock, and then clench his keys in anger. He was in charge here. His coveted internship at the Radamanthus had been won by four years of agonizingly careful manipulation and bribery, charm and skill, and this creature, naked and shaven-headed dared to speak to Channard as if he were a child or a servant, or an orderly. Channard tucked in the edges of his superiority more firmly around himself and spoke again to the prisoner in the condescending language that would mark their positions firmly in place. He flipped through pages of his clipboard.

"Perhaps we've had a lapse of memory, hmm? You were brought to the Radamanthus Asylum after an altercation with the police. We will treat your injuries, I assure you—both those of the body and the mind. And then, if you present no danger to society, we will happily set you at liberty. Don't think of this as insulting. Think of it instead as an opportunity."

"The clothing you have offered insults me. The food you have offered insults me. The captivity you keep me in is the greatest insult of all."

Channard added another note, although reluctant somehow to escape that pied gaze. _British accent, upper-class London_. It was his own accent, clean and perfect as water, rippling slightly only over certain phonemes to give itself away.

"You were naked and dehydrated, and raving."

"So would you be, if you were a captive in an evil country. Raving."

Channard made a note on the chart. _Possible Communist or anarchist affiliations?_ He decided to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

"I'm Dr. Phillip Channard. Do you remember your name?"

The prisoner looked at him, expression dismayed and somehow triumphant.

"Thank you for your name, Doctor-Phillip-Channard."

"Your surname," he demanded, letting irritation inflect his voice.

The prisoner smiled again, backing away into the brilliance of the overhead bulb, stretching his face to it as if to the warmth of the sun. His incisors were prominent, and gleamed like polished bone. "'Majesty.' Forename, 'Your,' Doctor-Phillip-Channard. Will that satisfy?"

Channard felt warm satisfaction uncoil from the pit of his belly. His conscious mind, so regulated, so careful, attributed this to the first gesture towards mutual trust. The prisoner—the patient—was evasive but responsive to questions. But Channard felt something else welling up through his professional and scientific personal. It was a new feeling. It was pleasure, predatory plesaure, the anticipation of a rapist finding a target alone at night. _Here, now_, he thought. _Wait. Know more._ He jotted down on the form. delusions of grandeur, ps. schizoid amnesia type II. This initial diagnosis, along with the intake notes, would be enough to hold this creature beyond the regulated 48 hours of observation.

_I will hold you_, he thought, running his eyes over the creature's pale skin, from the crown of his close-cropped blond head to quiescent amber length of his sex to the limber strength of his arched feet. _I will hold you and I will keep you_.

"It will not satisfy," Channard said, his tone now gentle, thick with incipient pleasure.

The creature raised his arms above his head, for all the world as if he were bathing in the light. Even his bruises lost their horror in the luster of this elegant stretch, becoming like the patterns on an animal's pelt. Channard noted the lack of hair at underarm or groin.

"Albans, then. Tyto Albans. That will have to do." He finished his stretch with a complicated roll of his forearms and fingers, and was suddenly square-shouldered again, giving Channard a terrifying dagger of a stare before his face relaxed into sadness.

"Tyto. If I offer you fresh clothing and food, will you dress and eat?"

"What choice will I have? Try asking again tomorrow. My despair may outweigh my pride, who can say? And that, Doctor-Phillip-Channard, is the best you shall have from me today."

* * *

_(**Author's note**: chapters 1-12 have been updated to include additional material and fix some errors. And please: while keeping in mind this is a horror/suspense story, I still appreciate reviews. If you're enjoying what you read, please let me know.)_


	2. The Owl's Jesses

Channard found he was hungry, in an almost physical way, to meet with Tyto Albans the next day. He had dressed himself carefully, as if for a lover, from the skin out, freshly shaven and dressed in clean and neatly tailored clothing, a freshly starched shirt, cufflinks, pressed pants, a slim stylish dark tie rigid as an executioner's garotte. He looked at himself critically in the mirror, seeing a man of thirty-three, strong and compact, thick sandy hair kept carefully styled, pale, but with dark hooded eyes that, unlike Alban's, gave away nothing. He must be careful today. He was here to take, not to give.

Although he told himself that his eagerness was to understand the core of Alban's violent and unsophisticated aversion to authority, and that he would be allowed to do this under cover of civic and professional duty, he already felt that something more was going on. Albans' intake papers noted that he had broken the arm of the first police officer who had laid hands on him, slashed open the basilic vein of a second with his bare nails, and hissed violently as a cat for two hours after coming to in his jail cell, speaking to no one. He had been found naked at a local park, wearing nothing but a bronze and gold necklace, in the late evening hours, mouth and hands covered in blood but with no obvious injuries. He had thus far spoken to no one but Channard.

And then he'd been sent to Radamanthus; the local police, unimaginative and overwhelmed, had been glad to see the back of him. His defiance coupled with his obvious sense of his own importance, his delusions of grandeur, his initial feral affect—these seemed to Channard's civilized medical persona to be indicative of a mind unlike and irredeemably perverse to common human nature.

His bestial self, which Channard had tried to suppress for almost twenty years, begged to be fed a rich meal of penetrative cruelty. _He will defy you_, the beast whispered, _as he had thus far defied all others. You can break him. Take. Eat. He's here for you_. Channard shook his head. The appetites of his lust and cruelty often lied to him, but he knew this time, at least as far as Tyto Albans was concerned, that they were speaking the truth. _Know and possess him_, the hungry beast whispered. _Steal him. Keep him. See. Know. You can. You can_.

He had scheduled the appointment in one of the concrete-and-steel exam rooms, where everything was bolted down or locked with his keys. He had come in out of rotation order to examine and treat the (_prisoner, creature_) patient, bumping an uncomplaining and unambitious internist. His interest in Albans was covetous in the extreme. He wanted no one else to lay proprietary rights to him, even in a way as tangential as a physical examination.

Channard had even considered collecting Albans for the exam himself, but like an ambush predator, preferred to meet in a situation where Albans would be unable to anticipate or negotiate any conditions in the journey from cell to exam room. Let Tyto understand that every moment of surcease and civiity came from Channard. He caught himself breathing quickly, and forced himself to be calm.

He adjusted the position of his clipboard and pencil neatly aligned with the countertop, and arrayed the examination instruments neatly on the tray as the two orderlies thrust themselves violently into the room, half-dragging Tyto Albans with them. He mentally noted, with interest, that they had pushed or pulled him into a straightjacket, and a johnny under that, which rode up to his mid-thighs. The patient should have looked humiliated and ridiculous, but he stood tall and proud under the beefy hands of the attendants, arms crossed over his breast like some Egyptian mummy. "We had some prollems, doctor," said Hobart, the shorter of the two. "He ain't strong, very, but he fights like a cat. Took ten minutes to get him decent. Almost scratched Ames' eyes out." Hobart jerked his chin at Ames, who indeed had some lightly bleeding scratches on his face. "If I didn't see his bits hanging out, I'da sworn he was a girl, the way he fights."

Channard noticed that Albans had lost a paper slipper somewhere between then and now. "Thank you, gentlemen. Come back in one hour and return the patient to his room. And wash your face, Ames. If those injuries need any treatment I'll see to you after." Ames gave a curt nod and shoved Albans forward into the other orderly's keeping. "You can leave us, Hobart."

"I don't like to do that, doctor. He don't weigh much but he's a fury."

"I'm sure I can handle him. Lock the door after yourself, please."

Hobart hesitated, and then gave a nod. He muttered something darkly in Albans' ear and pushed him toward Channard, and then went out. But he stood at the reinforced glass porthole, staring in, until Channard impatiently pulled the privacy screen in front of the door, blocking the view. Only then did Channard hear a grunt of disgust and Hobart's footsteps moving away.

"So, Tyto. Are we giving the staff trouble already? That may bring you to some grief later on. Turn around."

Albans backed away from him, and Channard found himself glad to see a flash of fear in his patient's face, even if pride allowed him only one step before pausing.

"I can't treat your injuries if the straightjacket remains on. Don't you want to take it off?"

Albans grimaced and shut his eyes so tightly that the scab line on his black eye split, spilling red blood down his face like tears. Then he opened them, his face washed clean of all affect. "I dislike hands upon my person. It offends me."

"It's something you will learn to endure. But if you cooperate today, and do as I say, the straightjacket need not go back on. So please decide. Shall I call Ames and Hobart back in, and have them hold on to you while I treat you? It'll be right back into the straightjacket for you for the next twenty-four hours. Or you can cooperate with me, answer my questions openly, and have your arms unbound when you're back in the isolation room. You have ten seconds to decide."

He saw Albans' eyes flicker up to the clock on the wall and then to his face. His arms, crossed over his breast, rose and fell gently in time to his breaths. At the ninth second, he said, quietly, "No more straightjacket. I will answer your questions about me."

"Good. Turn around."

Channard was as careful as he could be not to touch him unnecessarily as he unbuckled the canvas straps and pulled the straightjacket from his body. Once free, Albans ripped the johnny off at the collar, letting the strings and neck catch at his waist like some sort of outré kilt. "Sit," Channard said, pointing to the paper-covered metal table. Tyto shook his head once. "The metal burns," he said. "I will do what you ask here if I may stand." Metal phobia, Channard thought. Unusual.

"Stand or sit, either is fine," said Channard reassuringly as he took the only other furniture, his wheeled stool, picking up his clipboard and resting it in the bend of a crossed leg. "I have questions first about your general medical history. Please answer me fully."

Albans waited, not even blinking.

"Your intake sheet posits your age as between twenty-five or thirty years of age. How old are you?"

Tyto laughed a bemused laugh. Then he sobered as Channard's eyes flicked to the straightjacket folded on the counter.

"I cannot say, as I do not know. But I feel that if a lifetime were thirteen hours, I would be somewhere between the fifth and sixth hour. Will that suffice?"

"It will. We'll say roughly twenty-seven, though I'll be more certain when I examine your teeth."

"As with a horse," Tyto muttered.

"Exactly. Do you have people, family, friends, anyone who might be looking for you?"

"I have people and family and friends, but no one who would be looking for me. They know where I am. They sent me here."

"The good officers of the APD sent you here, Tyto. But I'm interested. Why do you say you were sent here?"

"It's the time of the Tiend. The tax to Hell. I am here to endure your Hell, Doctor-Phillip-Channard, until I may die or escape. My blood is noble." Tyto's spine straightened again, and despite the wounds and the impromptu skirt—or perhaps because of them—he looked every inch a Marc Antony or Alexander. "My punishment must be equivalently ignoble."

"You feel you are being punished? For what crime?"

Again that pie-eyed stare, the one that seemed to drive right into the dark places of Channard's brain like a dagger.

"No crime but being what I am. A necessary expiation. We make the sacrifice in every age, every turn of the wheel. We gift you ourselves and you inevitably ruin and betray us. It helps my people remember—" he drew in a pained, angry breath "—remember why we despise your kind and all your ways."

"What, doctors?"

"Humans." The inflection of his voice was the same as if he had said 'excrement.' "You are my keeper, my jailor, the one appointed to be my chief tormenting demon in this Hell, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. Do not forget that I do not forget."

"What did Hobart say to you when he left?"

"He said, 'Be nice to the doctor or I'll core you in two, little girl.'"

"And you understand what he meant?"

"He threatened rape. It might be easier to fight him with my arms unbound."

"I promise you I will not let that happen."

"No. I can see you are jealous of what you consider your personal property." He stared at the clock, eyes swirling as the second-hand swung around in red.

"Who are your people, Tyto?"

He was silent.

"The name you gave, here: Tyto Albans. That's a derivative of the Latin. Genus and species, the common barn owl. But before that, you've indicated twice that you consider yourself to be royalty. Are all your people royalty? Or are you special, even among them?"

Tyto stared back at him, giving nothing. Channard flipped through the clipboard until he produced a large black-and-white photograph of a piece of jewelry.

"What is this?" he asked, holding it up.

Tyto's eyes kindled, hungrily drinking up the image.

"It hasn't been lost," he said, staring at it. "Where is it?"

"Safe."

"It's mine. Bring it to me."

Channard looked at the picture. He had found himself as equally intrigued by the … necklace? … amulet? Yes, amulet. It was metallic, in the shape of a stylized horned animal head, upside-down, with an inset piece containing a double-spiral and runic script. He could decipher little else from the photograph. But it was beautiful, and something about it spoke to Channard's sensibility to the mysterious and occult. He already planned to lay his hands on it, steal it from the patient property room. Tyto must never be allowed to reacquire it, but it could be a jess on this wild bird, tethering him firmly to Channard's controlling hand. _Promise him something he wants, and make him give to get it._ He understood now that he was dealing with no mortal man. This creature was wild, and supernatural. Channard felt a stab of elation, a swirl of vainglorious pride in this unlooked-for acquisition. The things he could learn! The borders to devastate! The worlds to conquer!

He kept his eyes on the photo of the amulet. "Are you frightened of me, Tyto?"

The prisoner's face was a white-hot flame of annihilating fury. "Yes."

"Good." Channard felt the bird yank at the jess. "That's good. Now disrobe. I need to conduct your physical exam."

He had touched Tyto then, in ways almost as intimate as a lover's, through plastic gloves. What he had discovered three-quarters-of-an-hour of examination and treatment was enough to reassure him that Tyto was able to be hurt, even killed in the human way, but with enough subtle differences to mark him out as inhuman to the careful observer. He had made notes, a carefully abridged version which would go into the official files. But the core of the truth he would keep for himself.

_Skin, hair, nails: normal integument, small pores, fair. Hair light blond, fine, with occurrence of darker pigmentation. Hair cut close after intake processing; police profile documents shoulder-length at time of booking. Truncated eyebrows, high terminal points. No evidence of pubic or underarm hair. Vermiform prepuce intact. Cuticles indistinguishable from nails; nail underbeds thicker than usual. Normal cartilage of nose and ears; pinnae slightly pointed, attached lobes. Subject is clean of tattoos, piercings, or unusual scars._

Tyto had been obviously revolted at his touch. His skin had shuddered when Channard laid his gloved hands on him, psychically flinching from the contact while keeping his body still, as he had promised to do.

_Skeleton and musculature: elongated occipital skull. Third and fourth digital phalanges equivalent length of second. Muscles extremely strong in hands and feet. Toes extraordinarily prehensile. Teeth normal with unusually prominent and sharp incisors and canines. No evidence of dental caries or dentistry. No evidence of budding or removal of third molars. Very light bone density; patient weighs 65 lbs. at date of exam, stands 5'10. Endomorphic but biometric visual reading should indicate weight of appx. 130 lbs according to visible muscular density. Little body fat. Allergic to steel alloy._

Tyto had cried out in pain only once, in the exam, a small whine of breath when Chennard had used the calipers on his head and touched his skin with them. His skin had smoked, literally smoked, when the cold metal touched him. Small welts had formed at his forehead and at the back of his head where the metal had met flesh, ones that looked, on closer observation, like the wounds on his wrists. _Where the handcuffs had gone,_ Channard surmised. He felt triumphant. This was a clue, a discovery, an obvious and exploitable weakness. Another jess for the owl.

_Circulatory system, mucosa, vision: heartbeat light and stressed, pos. result of exam conditions. Evidence of hematoma (see notes 4, 5 on intake chart). Slightly acidic saliva. Blood drawn, will test later. Acute eyesight; no evidence of macular degeneration. Left pupil permanently dilated. Interior may reflect visual representation of brain activity. Grey irids, normal._

"And you say your left pupil is permanently dilated?" Channard had taken the ophthalmoscope to Albans' right eye, but when he raised it to the left one, the injured one, Tyto had raised his hand against him, blocking him. "Stop," he said. "Leave me this last space of privacy."

Channard had waited five minutes by the clock for Tyto's defiance to pass, and then raised the ophthalmoscope and gazed within.

There were worlds in there. Endless curving and recurving spirals of stone and green, the forests of millennia, a moon made of rock-crystal which cracked into a thousand pieces. A key. A box. A door. The succulent promise of terrifying knowledge. Shaken, Channard blinked. When he looked again, it was an eye, one with unusual, even animal configurations of rods and cones in the retina, but still only an eye.

_Injuries (see notes 4, 5, 6, 7): injuries treated._

"Are all of your people like you?"

Tyto lay his hands folded over his chest and said nothing.

"Remember our bargain," said Channard sternly.

"Our bargain was only that I would answer questions about myself. I am enough for you. I am the only one of my kind you will ever meet."

Channard reworded the question. "Are you a typical specimen of your species?"

"I am young," Tyto said dismissively. "I merely look unfinished."

"Who came before you?"

Tyto scowled, then smiled condescendingly, as if offering a marvelous treat to an ignorant pig. "Ofelia. That was her true name as much as 'Tyto Albans' is mine. Much good may it do you."

"I could always put you back in the straightjacket."

Tyto stared at him, unimpressed and amused. "You could. Then you would be an oathbreaker as well as a kidnapper and jailor. A very doubtful combination of names, Doctor-Phillip-Channard."

Channard cleaned the wound over his eye carefully, then took up a scalpel. "Be very still," he said. "I need to seal that cut or there'll be a scar." Holding Tyto lightly by the jaw, he flecked away the hair on his eyebrow. The metal hissed against his skin, but Channard did his work carefully. But he turned Tyto's face, and shaved away part of his other eyebrow, so that they remained symmetrical. "Beautiful," he said, unaware that he'd said the word out loud. Tyto was glaring at him. Channard's hand held the scalpel tight, and then he flung it back into the instrument tray and bound the cut with tape. Albans' eyebrows now flicked upward in two broken pieces over his eyes, making him look even more uncanny, more what he was.

"Are you done with me?" Tyto growled. Channard tilted his face one way and then another. His bones were so light, his body so beautiful. What would his skin feel like if he weren't wearing gloves?

"For now, yes."

"Good. Put me back in my box." Tyto moved away from his possessive hands and robed himself again in the dark johnny, tying it in the front with complicated knots. "I tell you now that I am freshly launched into your Hell and if I have to bear one more moment of you today, I will swallow my tongue and die. And then, Doctor-Phillip-Channard, you will have _nothing_. Do not tempt me."

"I will send you fresh clothing and food tonight, Tyto. Dress and eat. We will speak again in two days."

"As you say."

"I want us to be friends, Tyto. Consider that until we meet again."

"Doctor-Phillip-Channard. When you looked into my eye, my eye also looked into you. I know who you are. You are my enemy. Do not forget that I do not forget."

Shaken, Channard almost jumped when Hobart's knock sounded peremptorily at the door, signaling the end of their hour together. He would speak to him, and the other orderlies, later about appropriate decorum with this patient. But for now, he wanted to review his notes, and lay his plans for their next meeting. He would see him again, and when he did, Tyto Albans would understand what an enemy could take from him, once in his power.

He allowed himself twenty minutes of deeply pleasurable fantasies, and then began to make a few phone calls.


	3. Regalia of the Sacrificial Rite

Triptoleme University was not the most celebrated institution of higher learning in New England, but it had both deep roots and a vast endowment. Channard had performed his post-doctoral residency here. A statue of the seated Triptolemus had pride of place on the quadrangle, in his winged chariot, holding aloft a gilded sheaf of grain. Channard gave the demigod a courteous nod as he passed, on his way to meet with Dr. Emil Kline, the senior lecturer for religious anthropology.

Channard had audited one of Kline's classes on Classical Eastern European mystery cults and found the man to be in equal parts vastly well-informed on matters of the occult and pontifically vain of his knowledge. Kline was rumored to have ties to Thelemic societies and other less savory organizations, but Channard doubted that this was anything but Kline attempting to enhance his intellectual cachet.

But when Channard arrived for his appointment with his ersatz mentor, he found Kline to be hospitable and charming, inviting Channard to call him by first name, seating him in a pair of conversationally matched leather chairs in his office, and offering him fresh coffee from an electric percolator. Channard, flattered, found himself responding to Klein's hospitality, but still thought him a credulous mushbrain. Almost all soft sciences were populated by credulous mushbrains. If Kline had had what Channard did, locked in the padded observation room, he would have had no idea how to proceed, how to employ his hoard of information. To have the ability to theorize and act—that was the true power, wasted on vacuous dilettantes, no matter how many letters of degree followed their names.

Channard had begun by giving Kline a careful tracing of Albans' pendant, explaining that he had recently come into possession of the original, but refusing to give additional information. Kline had adjusted his glasses and looked the design over carefully. "I would be careful about who you showed this item to, Phillip. Likely black-market origins, although the grave-robbers often have no idea of the worth of the things they take. It's a rarity, reminiscent of some of the grave goods discovered at Sutton Hoo. The pre-Roman Celtic burial site."

"It's Celtic?"

"Likely proto-Celtic. The knotwork here is unformed, less precise. Materials?"

"Bronze, I believe. And gold." He had not had time to acquire the actual piece from the patient inventory, or at least not acquire it in a way that would not lead back to his pilfering.

Kline turned the paper upside-down. "I've seen items like it, though never one so primitive. It looks like a modified torc, the neck-ring signifying kingship, or a stylized head of the horned god, Cernunnos, the God over the Dead. The double-spiral here could be the serpent that attends the god. See how the spirals converge upon each other in a central circle indicate the joining of two worlds, flowing and reflowing upon each other. Life and death, the eternal duality."

"And the script?"

"I have no earthly idea," Kline said, examining the battered, near-indecipherable script that encircled the spiral inlay. "I remember your terminal class thesis very well, Phillip. Very well, even coming from your unfortunately rigid perspective. A theory about the use of psychotropic drugs on the worship practices of Classical and Early Modern mystery cults. Ergot and the St. Vitus dance, if I recall?"

"You remember better than I do," said Channard, smiling a false, self-deprecating smile. "A symbol of life and death-"

Klein interrupted him. "I'm sure you remember. You must have passed the Husker, old Triptolemus, on your way in here. One of the four Judges of Hell. Sitting with his handful of corn, the favored nephew of Demeter. He gave her aid and comfort when she travelled to the Underworld. Do you remember why?"

"Demeter was searching for her daughter, Persephone. Hades had kidnapped the girl into the Underworld." Channard felt a stab of excitement, the sense of pieces of a puzzle about to fall into place.

"As letter-perfect, and dry, as Bullfinch's Mythology, Phillip. It is referred to as the Rape of Persephone. The God of Hell stole the Child of Spring down into the Underworld and had intercourse with her there. His germination of the flower-girl is the root of all mystery religions. The seed of the corn is planted in the earth, and then bursts forth in glory and new life. Stories of a young and beautiful godling brought into the land of death exist in all agricultural societies. But of course, these creatures come forth to life deeply changed by their time of congress with King or Queen Death. The mystery-cults were a way of reenacting this rite, for the individual to put him or herself in the role of the young godling, to enter the labyrinth of the world's fundus and burst forth to life and change, liberated from symbolic death. I believe you wrote about the death-drive in your thesis. A method for these primitive, ascientific people to make peace with their own mortality, isn't that how you put it? An offering of themselves to temporary death, not to be acquired in any other way but symbolically, through ingestion of drugs, through dreams, or sexual intercourse."

"Paying the Tiend to Hell," Channard murmured.

"Oh yes," Klein said, his eyes lighting with satisfaction. "Pleasing that you remember such a tiny detail after such a long time."

"Forgive me," Channard said. His hand, holding his cup, trembled slightly. He sipped and forced himself calm, "I remember the word but not why I remember it."

"One moment. I believe I have the excerpt from the Child Ballads here. " Klein put down his cup, crossed to one of the heavy filing cabinets, and flickered his fingers over the files until he drew out a folder. He put it on his desk and turned over the photostatic pages until he found what he was looking for, and began to read in the rolling, mellifluous style which had convinced Channard to take his course, for the lesson in inflection alone.

"And pleasant is the fairy land,

But, an eerie tale to tell,

Ay at the end of seven years

We pay a Tiend to Hell;

I am sae fair and fu o flesh,

I'm feard it be mysel.

'But the night is Halloween, lady,

The morn is Hallowday;

Then win me, win me, an ye will,

For weel I wat ye may.

"It's the story of Tam Lin, a fairy knight, who was redeemed from, or prevented from performing, his sojourn into the Underworld by his pregnant human lover. The fairy monarchs are likely descendants, in the Brittano-Celtic oral tradition, of the pre-Christian gods of the British Isles and parts of central Europe. The Tiend was supposed to be a tax, or a reparation, giving one of their number to Hell to dwell there for a limited span of time. In pre-Christian times, it must have been a ritualized performance of human sacrifice, a death by fire. The few items I've seen that look like yours come from grave goods placed with the corpses of younger men and women, and sometimes, but rarely, with children, in pre-Roman Britain, but not in any of the usual burial sites. These burials were apart, near but not inside earthworks and barrows, considered to be the domain of fairies. You find more fairies and fewer gods in the English lore.

"But I'm afraid my scope of knowledge is fairly limited where English mystery cults are concerned. Even when fairies appear in documents from the Early Modern, they are referred to as being extinct, or vanished, long before. Even Shakespeare, in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, sets his fairy-tale romance in Classical antiquity. There is very little reliable information, although I could refer you to some of the recent work by Montague Summers or Keith Thomas. There's relatively little to be known that can be trusted as authentic information and not embellished fantasy. Let me provide you with a few references, for them and the "Tam Lin" material." Kline selected a leaf of the school letterhead and noted citations in his neat script. He paused a moment, and then made two more notations. "We have some of the Welsh _Taliesin_ in the special collection, and the unabridged _Golden Bough_. As well as…" Kline paused, looking momentarily disturbed. "… as well as an unpublished dissertation on cyclic god-sacrifice and mystery cults in Roman Britain. You might find it … useful." He gave Channard a measuring look, and then wrote down the third citation, and handed it over, almost reluctantly. Channard took it eagerly, trying not to rip the page directly from Kline's hands.

After that it was easy to round out the conversation with a few pleasantries. Channard went directly to the library, with the uneasy sense that Kline was glad to see the back of him, had been somehow disturbed by offering him his knowledge. As if he had committed some sin, and Channard was Satan's scribe, ready to note it down in the Book of Deeds, as a witness against him.


	4. Hades Drank Her Tears Like Wine

_(Author's Note: My dear readers, in this chapter things become darker, if possible, and **those who suffer from assault triggers ought to avert their eyes.** **Troubling material occurs after the line break**. What happens there is necessary to the story. In the next chapters__ will go to yet more sorrowful and dangerous places. Heroes will overcome and villains will be punished, and fanservice will be given. Thank you to those who were willing to sample this story, and for those of you determined to continue with the feast, I sincerely beg you to** read and review**. -E. W.)_

Therapy began the next day. As with all his patients, he had Albans delivered to his office. Books and curios were stacked hygienically on the shelves, pencils and other potential implements of weaponry carefully locked in his desk. The furniture was sparse and cheap, naugahyde and aluminum and steel where Channard would have preferred wood, but he had had the room painted, when he took up this position, in a dull soothing green. Albans arrived, escorted by Hobart and Ames, and was deposited in one plastic chair. As Channard had requested, Hobart had also brought a straightjacket, draped with signifying threat over the second chair. Channard had locked the door behind them; he held the only keys here.

"Good morning, Tyto. I'm pleased to see you dressed." And dressed, indeed, he was, but in an outlandish, barbaric way. Albans was wearing the too-large dark blue pyjama top around his shoulders like a kimono, ignoring the buttons. The sleeves, which would have already been too long even without this clavicle-baring wrap, were twisted and ruched at the elbows. Albans had apparently either taken his nails or his teeth to the fragile, aged cotton to create slashes which he had cleverly knotted, so that the tip of the cuffs ended precisely an inch below his wrist. The pyjama bottoms had received similar knotted treatment at the knees and calves. Loose folds of the hem ended an inch below his ankles. He was barefoot. The navy hospital johnny of the day before was reknotted to form a thigh-length kilt, with some of the string-ties ripped from the collar and waist, in a new pattern of complex knotwork that hung from the bound and folded cloth at the waist like netsuke from a Japanese obi. And the red terrycloth robe, somewhat stained and bedraggled from its tenure at the Asylum, Albans wore like an Elizabethan courtier would have worn his sleeved cloak, using the right arm only and cross-belted above one shoulder and below the left arm. Albans was left-handed, Channard surmised.

"I've made concessions. Better to dress myself than be dressed."

"And so you've made the hospital clothing into your own."

Albans inclined his head carefully, as if saluting an equal. "Precisely."

"But you still haven't eaten, Tyto. Aren't you hungry?" He allowed himself to smile with amusement.

"I'm very hungry." Tyto lowered his chin to his breast, and Channard saw how white and pained his face was, how the muscles in his long neck stood out like wires under the skin. "But I will not eat, thank-you for your courtesy in asking."

"I have more questions today, Tyto. I want you to speak to me, candidly, as you did the last time we met. I want you to speak to me as you would to a friend. I have tests. I have inquiries. Do not lie to me."

"I do not lie. Unlike you, Doctor-Phillip-Channard, I have too much self-respect to lie."

"But you deceive, Tyto. You evade. You dissemble with words."

"You hear what you wish to hear, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. A liar puts himself in the power of the one he lies to. You are lying now, pretending you are not my enemy. Nothing I say will mean _anything_ to you."

"Do not parse with me, Tyto. I want you to answer my questions. Leave the interpretation up to me."

"And if I refuse?"

Channard nodded, unsurprised, and allowed himself another amused, cruel smile. "The straightjacket, and a word in Hobart's ear regarding its use."

"Your intimidation techniques are repetitive and typical," said Albans, staring over at the straightjacket as if it were an amusing problem. "Ask, test, probe, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. I will respond."

"Oh, call me Phillip," Channard offered coyly. "Let's be relaxed with one another."

Across the surface of the desk, near the outer edge where Albans could lay hands upon them, Channard placed a variety of interlocking ingenious puzzles and games. He had considered bringing a chessboard, but had decided the analogy would have been too on the nose. In any event, he knew himself to be a mediocre player.

"Puzzles and games help us unlock doors in ourselves, help us to see things we don't see in the normal way." He felt, rather than saw, the look hungry pleasure suffuse Albans' face at the sight of the toys.

"That's the first correct thing you have said, Doctor-Phillip-Channard." Tyto reached out for a series of four blocks, brightly and differently colored on each face, red and black and blue and white. "What material are these fashioned from?"

Channard shrugged. "Plastic."

"Plas-tic. How is this game played?"

"Arrange the blocks in a line so that no two faces of same color touch each other."

Albans picked up each block in turn, examined each face, and set it back down on the table in seeming random order after giving it a precise twist. He paused at the fourth block, turned it, and placed it carefully between the first and second, then pushed the blocks together. "There."

Channard leaned over and examined the arrangement of faces. Albans had solved it.

"You are very intelligent, and capable. Or have you played this game before?"

"Something like it, yes. Many times."

The other puzzles were also easily solved. The Burr puzzle, a disassembled Chinese wood-knot, the Soma cube. Only the Vexiers, with their looped wires and balls, eluded Tyto. He refused to touch the metal at all. Channard nodded to himself. _Yes. You know what he is_, the beast whispered. _Soon. Let's see what we have before we name it._

Channard passed him the standard intelligence quotient summary text. "Fill this out," he said. After a careful moment, he also handed Albans a crayon.

Albans looked the paper over, sniffed the stapled pages, and scrutinized the questions in a blank way, as if it were another puzzle. He was more interested in the crayon, handling it gingerly, then rolling its cylindrical length from finger to finger and letting it flow over his knuckles before catching it again in his palm. He made several vertical marks on the paper, examined the color and texture, and then pushed the test back across the desk to Channard.

"I am not literate in your language, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. May I keep this?" He held up the crayon, flickered it above and between his fingers with subtle movements. Those hands, strong enough to break a human radius and ulna like chickenbones with one panicked grip, were dexterous enough to turn a crayon into a juggler's bauble.

"You may keep it while I ask these questions," Channard said, slightly exasperated. He proceeded with the exam, asking the questions aloud, marking the responses down, as Albans continued to find new perambulations of crayon-movement with fingers and thumbs. All was as expected; Albans' speed in solving puzzles was a presentiment of logical genius. There was only one question Albans failed, at least according to the rubric of the test, and that was the maze. Turning a leaf over so the complicated series of linear paths, dead-ends, and passages was visible, Channard marked a dark blot at the entrance to the maze and one at the exit. "Connect these two dots without crossing over the walls, in the most efficient way possible. Take as much time as you like. You may use the crayon."

"The nature of the test is to see how well I can hold the memory of the correct path in my mind?" he had asked.

Channard had nodded. "There are multiple correct paths. The test is to see whether you can find the shortest route with the fewest mistakes." Albans had looked at the puzzle, then taken the paper in his two hands, and folded it gently, pinching the two dots together with his fingertips. "Done," he said. "The path is an illusion."

"You've solved a two-dimensional puzzle in three dimensions," Channard stuttered.

Albans released the dots, letting the paper bend flat once more. "I have solved a _one_-dimensional puzzle in three dimensions. Don't be troubled," he said calmly, looking at Channard with an expression of exasperated pity. "Your kind put too much faith in choice."

"We call it free will," Channard said. "You don't believe in free will?"

"I wouldn't be here if I did." Tyto bounced the crayon vertically from fingertip to fingertip. The blue cylinder seemed to love him; it was the only explanation for the way it moved for him, pistoning in the air before landing to bounce again on each nail. Tyto smiled at it, and not Channard.

"But you said you were here to endure hell. My hell, correct? Isn't the maze like a form of Hell? How can you endure it, as you said, if you move from the entrance to the exit in one move?"

The crayon was hooked under his leftmost little finger; Albans held his index and ring finger out and looked at Channard between them. "I haven't decided whether I want to."

"What, go in?"

"Ask your questions," Tyto said impatiently. Channard finished the test.

"I want you to eat," Channard said. "It's been four days and more since you ate. Will you eat?"

Tyto gave him a look of disgusted anger. "I will not."

Channard had folded the test and locked it back in his drawer. "I know why you won't, too. I've done my research, but I've also listened to you, Tyto. You've yourself told me exactly why you won't eat. You're attempting to starve yourself to death. Moving from the entrance to the exit of this world without spending any time truly within it. There's nothing you can ever say that doesn't tell me infinitely more than is safe."

"Then I won't speak to you again." Albans sneered, then childishly shook his head and made a great matter of closing his mouth. He turned his eyes down to the crayon, caressing it with his thumb, then gave it a twirling roll.

"How new is that flesh you're wearing?" Channard mused, looking him over. Even in silence every inch of Tyto Albans seemed to communicate. He was beautiful, and fresh. "Or did you borrow someone else's body? Slide in like a demon, take possession? But no, I suppose if you had, someone would have come looking for the rightful owner. And there's your amulet, too. It's as real as you are."

Tyto locked eyes with Channard, then pretended to more disdain.

"I know what you are now," Channard said. "If I guess it in one, will you talk to me?" Tyto rolled his eyes. "Oh, you think I'm not so clever to figure you out? Or maybe afraid I'm cleverer than you are? One guess, Tyto Albans."

Tyto looked at him, tossed the crayon in the air and caught it in his palm. He nodded arrogantly, like a king permitting a peasant a very great favor.

"_Sidhe_," Channard hissed.

The smile on Albans' face drained away with his blood. His lips parted.

"Fae. Moirai. Rakshasa. Nichnytsia. Eleutheroi. Yes, Tyto. You are a creature from that other race of mankind, cousins to humanity. Your physical strength is inferior to ours. Your body is mortal, but different. Your rules of courtesy and engagement, also different. Cold iron, or steel, burns you. You come from a place where the progression of time is disjointed. You are a stranger in this world. And that's why you refuse to eat. Eating our food would bind you to this world."

Tyto gripped the crayon so tightly it shattered into fragments in his palm with a quiet pop.

"Fairy thing, talk to me. Why bother to come here at all if it was only to leave again?"

Tyto raised his head to the overhead light, drinking it with his eyes until tears pooled at their corners. "It is permitted to me to die." The shards of the crayon fell from his fingers and trickled onto the tile floor. "It is still permitted for me to choose."

"A three-dimensional solution to a one-dimensional puzzle," Channard said. He stared at Tyto until the other man (not a man) looked at him. "Some might call that cheating."

"We can do as we please," Albans said. "Rules, walls, the illusion of choice. What does that matter to us? I've seen all I want to, and I want to leave."

"You've seen nothing," Channard said, his voice a seductive promise. "While you were unconscious, you were fed intravenously, with a saline solution. Do you understand? Water and salt. Isn't that supposed to bind your kind? Salt? Perhaps you are already bound. But I believe the binding of food involves reception and consent to contamination with the things of this world. Like Persephone, who ate the fruit of Hades' realm, and wasn't able to permanently escape him. My theory is that if you eat food here, under your own power, you'll have to remain. I'd like to test this theory, and you will cooperate."

Channard unlocked the top drawer of his desk and withdrew a paper bag which gave off the redolent, unmistakable smell of ripe peaches. He selected one, rubbing his thumb over its velvet fuzz. He came around the side of the desk until he was standing in front of him. "Do you see how it glows, even in this light, Tyto? Not all one color, but pale orange, the red of a blister, the gold of sunlight." Channard held the fruit out in front of him. Albans stared at the peach. His nostrils flared as the scent of the fruit tickled his mucous membranes. The muscles of his cheeks worked as he chewed on his tongue. "Do you want it?" Channard smiled cruelly and held it out further, offering it, tantalizingly.

"No," Tyto whispered. But his eyes coveted the fruit, and he stared at it as if trying to devour it with his gaze. And Channard knew he had him cornered.

"Oh, Tyto. You've just told me your first lie. You do want it, you do." He set the peach down next to his thigh, just within easy reach. Tyto kept staring at the fruit, nails squeaking his grip on the plastic seat of his chair.

.  
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* * *

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Channard grabbed him them, serpent-quick, a hand on each wrist, quick, just quickly enough for Tyto to feel himself cuffed. He struggled and spat, cursing Channard in an inhuman language, flexing his legs for a devastating taloned swipe with his feet. But Tyto Albans was weak and worn, where Channard was strong and ready, and their bodies were too close for Tyto's movements to be effective. Anticipating the counterattack, Channard kicked the man's legs from under him and forced him, his light weight making this easy, across the desk, on his back. The discarded plastic and wood puzzles dug into Tyto's spine as he struggled, futilely. Tyto's grip was strong, but his bones seemed hollow as his namesake, and it was easy to control him when it was a contest of brute force.

Channard transferred Tyto's' crossed wrists to one of his broad-splayed hands, feeling the bones grind together, and straddled one of those kicking legs between his much stronger thighs. The fold of cloth of Tyto's improvised skirt effectively pinioned his other leg.

"Damn you!" Albans shrieked.

Channard laughed and took a deep and brutal bite from the sticky-sweet fruit, down to the very stone, and looked down at Tyto, deep in the face. He chewed carefully, and swallowed. He found himself aroused by physically dominating Tyto. He considered attempting to still the gallant reflex, but he could see that Tyto could feel him pressing against him, even through the fabric of their clothing, and that it terrified and confused him. He slid himself higher over the man's thigh, pressing himself belly-to-belly with his victim, pressing him harder into the desk. "Persephone," Channard said quietly, "You _will_ eat. I'll give you a choice. You can receive what I offer in one of two ways. You may take it from my hand, or from my mouth." He took another deep bite of the succulent fruit, juices running down his chin, and lowered the morsel between his lips until it grazed Albans' mouth.

"No," Tyto hissed between clenched teeth. "No." He bucked, whipping his head back and forth, his breathing thready with panic. Amber beads of juice fell from Channard's lips to Tyto's cheek. And then, understanding that Channard would follow through on his threat, he ceased to struggle. He tilted his face up, blinking, resistance broken. "From your hand, then, _damn_ you, you filth."

Channard waited a few moments, then withdrew the morsel between his lips with two fingers and slid it between his captive's lips. Albans stared his hatred at Channard as he ate. Channard offered him, then, still pinned, a third, a fourth bite, directly from the fruit, stroking the stray juices from the corners of Tyto's mouth over his lips in a parody of tenderness, pressing himself close to Tyto's trembling body in each offering bite, until it was all devoured but the stone. Only after he had compelled him to suck forth the last threads of flesh from the wooden core did Channard wipe his sticky fingers across Tyto's face and let him go.

Albans stood, scrubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. The tears of submission Channard had expected did not arrive. Instead, Tyto careened from wall to wall like a wildcat, dislodging books from the shelves and the calendar pinned to the wall, shoulders working in his motley garb as if holding back sobs. He came to rest behind Channard's desk, bashed his head against the painted brick once, hard. He pivoted his neck on the contact point and stared at Channard.

"Doctor-Phillip-Channard," he said quietly. "Phillip," his lips tasting the name. His mismatched eyes mourned. The glaze of juices made his skin gleam. "Give me my amulet and let me go. You don't understand what you are doing, to yourself or to me, but you can stop this. There is still time to redeem yourself. For your sake, set me free. End this game."

"Will you eat from now on, Tyto? Will I need to repeat the lesson?"

"Lesson." He banged his head against the wall again. "Lesson. I will eat. What choice is there for me, now?"

"None, Tyto," said Channard softly, almost with pity. "There never was much hope of anything else. You were meant to be mine. I was meant to have you. You yourself told me so."

It was then that Tyto closed his eyes, turned his face to the wall, and wept.


	5. The Bird in the Hall

He held it in the palm of his hand. Bronze, and gold, warm to the touch. But when he tried to slip it around his neck, the chain shrank until it was too small to fit on a finger, or evaded his head altogether, slithering silently across his eyes. So Channard was content to hold it, knowing that it, like its owner, belonged to him.

Tyto Albans' amulet gave forth light without illumination, in the dark. Like Tyto, it had been easy to acquire. He had checked it out from the patient inventory, still in the plastic police evidence bag, and returned the bag, but substituted with a cheap brass pocketwatch he had bought from the corner pawnshop. The checking attendant hadn't even noticed the difference. And now he held it, rubbing his thumbs over it, cupping it in his palms, pressing it between his hands like a vise. Though metal, and polished, Tyto's amulet refused all fingerprints. The oil of his fingers slid off it like water, the metal keeping its dull sheen.

He held it against his skin. It thrummed like a second heartbeat. He stroked it like he had Tyto's mouth. And he was full of a chill pain, like pity, and a hot pain, like shame.

"No," he said, lifting the amulet to his lips, kissing it. Why should he have any shame? He had wanted that unearthly creature for his own, understood what to do to bind him, and how to do it. He had _done_ it. Channard felt an incipient laugh and was surprised when it came out as a groan. One gushing, weak cry, and he disciplined himself to choke the rest down, salt in the back of his throat. He slid the bronze amulet down over his chest, against his belly. It was warm as skin against his skin, and the feeling made him shudder. He saw himself in the mirror.

_Which of us is the madman_? Channard suddenly wondered. With difficulty, because it required an act of will to put it away from himself, he threw the amulet to his unmade bed. He stared at his nakedness with dawning embarrassment. His behavior with Tyto Albans was obsessive in the extreme, to the point of psychosis. Where had his mind been? Who was he? He was in danger of losing everything that mattered to him by pursuing him. It was as if Tyto himself had created this Doctor-Phillip-Channard, with his contemptuous conversations. Everything, even to the act of feeding him, had been something Tyto had intimated, had suggested.

He had wanted to do these things because Tyto had taught him… liberty in desire.

Channard was acquainted with power and the use of power, but not with desire. Desire was the disease inside him, the lure. Desire was the appetite of the imagination run wild, the belief in the fulfillment of the impossible. He had always suppressed the desires of his flesh when they arose. With Tyto Albans, he found himself, for once, at their mercy. Had he, had Channard himself, become more than he had been before, just as polluted by their mutual congress? No. It couldn't be. Channard was a man. An extraordinary man. A man of science and reason, who had the good luck to see and know an unknown creature of a hidden race. He could see both perspectives—the rational and the uncanny together. Tyto was limited to his own narrow understanding.

But his desire was for Tyto's reality, because of the lure of magic. _Oh, magic_. The magic that Tyto seemed to hold just under his skin was the promise of a different world, a different way, a place and a people for whom Channard's own desires weren't just acceptable, but lauded. Suppressed passions could be unleashed from their pickling-jars and allowed to run amok. There were infinite cruelties Tyto himself had invited Channard to perform upon his flesh, because Tyto actually seemed to want to be taken as far as Channard could go. And Channard had had time and disappointment and education to help him go quite far, given the proper invitation.

The neophytes into the Eleusian Mysteries that he read about had been painfully flogged while clinging to the knees of their guides, pain and comfort in one. _Pain and necessary cruelty are essential to the rite, pain and cruelty and comfort. Knowledge of the infinite requires self-negation. Attainment is achieved only by abasement._ His desire for the rite of congress was natural-

"It's no rite!" Channard yelled to the dimness of his bedroom.

Because if it was a rite, then his role was also prescribed. If it was a rite, he did not stand above and away from Tyto Albans. He stood very near to him and just below him, in the court of lesser devils whose names were never known.

He would need to be a superlative teacher, to stand closer to Tyto Albans. Those weak and feminine tears Albans had cried were proof that he was sensitive to pain, especially emotional pain. _Give him more pain, then. You know what you could do_. _You're stronger than he is_.

But if it weren't a rite. _Oh, then_. What he was considering doing… he ran his hands down his naked skin, and ached with fear. He would lose everything if he were caught. He would lose his medical license, his reputation, the narrow path to intellectual fulfillment that was the only route open to him in this barbaric and puritanical society.

It was a leap of faith, he realized. He stared at himself in the mirror.

What if, as Channard had long suspected, even from earliest childhood, that magic was simply another form of technology, a lost branch of science? He had studied religion and literature in his first college years, thinking to take a degree in theology before he realized that religion was simply unrefined psychological practice. But though he knew he had no vocation for the ministry, the quality of the power that priests and assorted God-botherers wielded was different than, perhaps greater than, the power he could command as a doctor. Channard couldn't specifically define what he had felt during the rites of his earliest years, but it seemed to exist in the exchange of power between the priest and the congregation, a power given and received and given again until the echo became louder than the sound. Ripples in water, a whisper to a shout.

He snatched his robe over his body and belted it. Religious authority was certainly powerful, but it was created and maintained by belief. When the priest left the altar, the altar was wood. When the congregation left the church, it was only an empty space. Science didn't work in such ways. When something was scientifically true, it was true whether the observer perceived it or not, whether an observer existed or not.

Magic was just a word for a species of technology that wasn't fully understood. Fire must have been magic when the first primitive user demonstrated it to a second, and the shaman's predictions of herd migrations was magic to the hunters. The sensible Egyptian deities had taught writing and mathematics to their worshippers, allowing the people to fully farm the floodplains of the Nile. Their knowledge wasn't available because they were deities, Channard supposed, but rather they were raised to godlike status because of the sciences they understood and applied. Even Thomas Edison, a glorified patent clerk, was given the honorific title of "wizard" for his application of the knowledge he had acquired. And so it certainly seemed reasonable that Albans' magic, if he possessed any, would be a form of knowledge that the intelligent person could understand and apply.

It could be a magic that changed the nature of the world. Perhaps it could even be a world where he would be allowed to love in the open. _ A world without fear..._

Channard observed himself in the mirror. Slowly, he eased one arm out of the red-and-white cotton sleeve of his robe, and let it drop. What did he look like to Tyto Albans? The folds of the fabric fell away from his right side like a toga. He slid his hands under the lapel of the left breast until the other shoulder was just exposed. Was he ugly to him? Like an ape dressed in a man's clothes? But Albans had never charged him with any physical imperfections, only spiritual or intellectual ones. He watched himself. He still had the beauty of health and strength, and half-dressed in this way, echoing Tyto's intuitive grace, he seemed a fit match. They were both birds in the hall, in the space between the known and the unknown.

He turned to the books at his bedside table. He'd been very busy today, reading. The Venerable Bede in "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" had described the rite of congress, of Christian conversion, using the bird in the hall metaphor. He flipped the slim tract over and retraced the words with his fingers.

_"It seems to me that the life of a man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your thegns and counselors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall. Outside, the storms of winter rain and snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one window of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, the bird is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. So man appears on earth for a little while—but of what went before this life, or what follows, we know nothing."_

"Yes," Channard breathed. "You came to me, you came to my hall, my Hell, Prince Owl. But why did you come? Why did you come to _me_?"

He had been trying to fully understand this all day. Underneath the tract, the unpublished dissertation on the Mystery Cults of Roman Britain was opened to a passage he'd been attempting to understand for hours.

_"For the children of the spiral, the neophytes of the Mysteries, there is more than simply the hall and the wintry world. There is the interstitial space, the walls of the labyrinth itself, which define the porous border between the world of life and death. The labyrinth is the door between the hall and the outer darkness through which the soul-bird flies._

_There within that un-space of the spiral threshold is a means for the living to make contact with the dead, for reality to penetrate into the sightless depths of mystery, where the deeper secrets of the further world beyond the hall can be known—and brought back, by right of the agonizing trials of the neophyte. All the sciences and technologies of the pre-Christian world—those of agriculture, metalworking, written language, mathematics, architecture—have been demonstrably introduced into human society via the children of the spiral._

_The lure of the labyrinth is the glory to be attained by the heroic reclamation of knowledge from the un-realm of the unconscious collective mind. The labyrinth is the place where discrete concepts are assembled into a creative and constructive gestalt, given form, meaning, and direction, a process of digestion and incorporation of observed data into a corporate and lucid whole. The Mysteries create a bridge between logos and mythos, erotically binding them into a pattern which human consciousness can read."_

"For him, this is Hell," Channard murmured. "He's entered this labyrinth from the opposite end, from his world." Like the human neophytes, the human children of the spiral, he had gone in naked and blind, decorated with a badge that marked his status. The labyrinth was the gateway through which Albans had passed as an initiate from that other place, an ambassador, or a sacrifice, from that other race. Here to suffer, to know, and to bring back some type of knowledge or secret from this world into his own. But what was that? What could that other race possibly want, or need, from this world?

He wanted to run to the amulet again and handle its perfect shape, but he resisted. Instead he ran his finger over the paper-tracing of the recurving double-spiral. Alban's pendant, the center of the double-spiral, represented the very heart of the labyrinth, the conjoined double threshold which extended from this world into a world beyond. But what was the world beyond? The afterlife? Or was the beyond-the-labyrinth, the further world, simply another plane of existence, not known or knowable? What were the faery folk? Were they demons in the flesh? Spirits of the dead? Something else?

He pulled open the Briggs book and traced his finger over the table of contents. It had been all but pressed on him by the overeager student librarian, although Channard had thought to dismiss it when he saw the author was a woman. Women were prone to logical inconsistencies and bloviating sentimentality. But now he was grateful. Chapter Five: "The Host of the Dead." There it was, buried between stories of the Wild Hunt and a chapter on Hobgoblins and Imps: _"…the distinction between the fairies and the dead is vague and shifting."_ Channard skimmed a few more pages and tossed the book across the room. Folk legends about spectral riders and dead lovers. Useless woman! Why wasn't there any certainty?

_"My blood is noble_," Albans had said. But he hadn't expected things to be so difficult, had he? Albans had spoken to Channard with contempt, the type of arrogance one only saw in the privileged classes, expecting things to be easy, expecting things to be given, never having to struggle and plan, as Channard always had, to acquire the necessities of life, the opportunity to live a life not under the grinding boot of poverty, or its match, ignorance. Tyto Albans had expected to be hurt, and to suffer, but he had expected the hurting and the suffering to be a species of pleasure, prettified and ennobled in his honor.

_Fool._ The rites demanded more of Tyto Albans than he was prepared to give. They demanded things that Channard very much desired to mete out.

Channard made his decision.

He realized his finger was in his mouth, tracing over his lips, tongue probing under his nail for any last vestige of the taste of peach. But he had washed his hands several times, and there was only the aftertaste of soap.


	6. The Width of a Circle

_(__**Author's note**__: At the risk of repeating myself, this chapter contains material that might constitute PTSD assault triggers. It is also the last chapter that contains nonconsensual sexual activity. For those interested in the continuity of the story but unable to read this material, Channard takes further steps to bind Tyto Albans to humanity, and then, in shame, grants him the gift of some limited freedom in the Asylum's common room.)_

(**Note Two**: the title of this chapter, "The Width of a Circle," is taken from a David Bowie song. Readers are encouraged to look up the lyrics.)  


After this first intercourse with human food, Channard saw that Tyto had resigned himself, at least in the most obvious ways, to the fact of his captivity. He regularly ate, though sparingly, from his tray-delivered meals. He no longer hissed or fought with the attendants. He was subdued, brought down in the world. He accepted the tokens Channard pressed into his hands—a pair of red velvet Chinese slippers with bead-embroidered dragons for his feet, an alphabet workbook with childish illustrations, a packet of crayons (the original pack; the blue was lost forever in shattered crumbles deposited in the wastebasket), a lined composition notebook, the favor of a shower and the chance to exchange his tatterdemalion clothes for fresh ones which he quickly altered in the same obscure ways to fit himself—he accepted these tokens passively, withdrawing into himself. Only once, when Channard attempted to offer him food again in the form of a chocolate bar, did Albans awaken, and refuse, with revulsion and nostalgic terror.

Channard privately diagnosed traumatic depression and, concerned that his pet might be actually capable of dying of a broken heart, had him moved out of his padded cell in the basement, where the artificial daylight shone day and night, and into the general dormitories, allotting him a private room, but not one with a window. Channard wasn't foolish. He heard good reports from Hobart and the other attendants. He caught up on the paperwork for his other patients. Tyto Albans ate. He slept. He did little else.

When they met again the following week, those brief feelings of pity and shame did not resurface, as Channard had feared they might. It was time. He was ready. The door was locked, the spring wound tight.

"Are you bound?" he asked. "Tyto. Tyto." Channard snapped his fingers in front of his face until Albans blinked, focused on him. "Are you bound to me?"

Albans' head flopped on his neck as he turned his face away, but not his eyes. They remained locked on Channard's.

"You want to hear me say it? Relive my shame." A pink blush colored his cheeks. "A trial. I'm not sure if I passed or failed." Albans closed his eyes. "Yes, I am bound to humanity now."

"Why does food bind?"

"The belly is a cauldron. What we eat comes into us, becomes a part of us."

"Fae?"

"All," he said dully. "Your kind, mine. I took what you gave me."

"You could have refused," Channard said uncertainly.

"I was afraid you might put something else of you inside me instead." Tyto shook his head in disgust, eyes still closed. He opened them and transfixed Channard with his dark eye. "Femininity invites rape. Masculinity evades it. I hadn't thought that the judges of the trials would be so clever. I hadn't foreseen _you_, Doctor-Phillip-Channard."

"Food binds, sex binds. What else?"

"The eyes are a cauldron."

"How do you mean?"

"Images. Sight. These things come in through the eyes, come in here." He lifted his hands and touched his temples. "My purity interrupted by seeing your world, feeding the cauldron of the eyes. A fall through fire."

"Or your ears, Tyto. Perhaps it isn't the eyes which are a cauldron, but the brain. Sensory input, digested in the labyrinth of the mind, excreted in dreams. Do you dream?"

"I dream."

"Your ideas about purity are interesting. Of course, in the Judeo-Christian context, there are laws regarding food purity and sexual purity, but the purity of sensory input, ideological input, is within my purview. " Channard stood and looked at his bookshelves. "The appetites of the imagination are… unnatural. I purify these appetites."

Tyto stared into the middle distance. Channard came to him and grasped his chin, turning his face to his. "Look at me."

Tyto's eyes burned holes through him, but Channard stared right back, until Tyto slashed his head away. Channard chuckled mildly and opened his leather kit. He withdrew syringe, ampoule, and needle, and fitted the three together in a scientific conjunction. "Hold out your arm," he directed, squirting out the balance of air. Like a puppet, Albans held out his arm. Channard found a tear in the fabric and laid his flesh bare to the needle. Albans hissed as the metal slid home, and when Channard released him, he cradled his arm like it was a separate part of him and in need of comfort.

"Ask me why," Channard demanded. "Ask me to stop."

"You don't want to stop," Albans said, his voice already thick with the drug.

"Beg me," Channard insisted. He loosed the knot of his tie, slipped it over his head, and then, cautiously, over Tyto's wrists, drawing it tight.

Tyto looked at him through the loop of his knotted wrists. "Everything you have wanted, I have done." He shook free of the knot, slipped the loose ends, and transformed the length of silk into a complicated cat's-cradle before dropping it to the floor. "But I won't beg." His chest seized once, and his neck rolled.

Channard knelt before him, cupped his hands along the softening flesh of Albans' calves, smoothing the fabric up over the underside of his knees, over his thighs. He pressed his fingers in through the lattice of cotton knotwork there, making contact with flesh. Albans' skin was warm to the touch, thrumming with energy. He wanted to drink in the texture with all his skin, and with both hands, he tore the cloth open, laying the flesh of one thigh bare.

He pressed his cheek against Tyto's knee, and kissed it. The scent of him, which he had expected to be dirt-stale, was only like masculine sweat and dark amber, dry wood after a hard rain.

He pressed his hands deeper into Tyto's clothing, wanting more of him. His flesh to Channard was a sweet drug, or a god he worshipped.

"Tyto Albans. Let me love you. You must give yourself to me." He caressed what he found with his hands. "Touch me. Please—"

This time the laughter was derisive. "Call me 'Your Majesty,' you sack of bones." In a motion too languid to be so powerful, Albans kicked him away. "Love you? You don't understand that word. So neither do I. You'll have to _steal_ what you want, Doctor-Phillip-Channard."

His head had cracked against the lip of his desk, darkening his sight around the edges, but Tyto's face was there in a halo of brightness. His hands found his necktie and he rushed Tyto, drawing the noose around his neck, pulling him to standing height against him, and bringing his face to his. And kissed him.

The taste of him was more intoxicating than the touch of his skin. His mouth gave an acidic burning tingle, and Albans' chest bubbled with a laugh that didn't stop even when Channard attempted a hesitant penetration with his tongue.

"Stop laughing," Channard yelled, and he hit him across the ear with a closed fist.

"Stop this. Do that," he mocked, gasping for breath, fumbling for the words. " What a marvelous collection of bruises you're giving me, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. Is this love?" Albans' eyes whirled in his face. The shadows collected in the room around the edges of his sleeves. He jerked his neck in Channard's tie. "Is this what love is?" And pivoting his entire body around the fulcrum of his neck, he walked up the vertical surface of Channard's wall until he stood, upside-down, slippered feet standing on the low ceiling.

"Come down!" Channard commanded. Desire flooded his body in sweet liquid pulses even as the impossibility of what he was seeing rocked his head like a second blow.

"Make me," Albans said, the hair on his head crackling out from his skull as if it were under electric current. He slipped the noose. "Show me how to play the game. Is it played… like this?" His nails darted out, slashing Channard's shirt down the front so the buttons rolled. "Or _this_?" He returned the blow Channard had given. His ears rang.

He tore at Tyto's shirt until it flew off his shoulders and onto the floor, but Albans appeared to be stuck as strongly to the ceiling as the light fixture. On cue, one of the bulbs exploded with a blinding flash and a cascade of glittering shards. Just before the second scintillated out, Albans' eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed. He would have shattered like the bulbs against the floor if Channard hadn't caught him, embracing him, breaking his fall with his own body.

In the dark, then, he breathed against Tyto's mouth and found that breath returned. Channard's hands defined his flesh in the dark, ripping and rending their clothing where it intervened between them. The sweat of their bodies, or perhaps just his, ran slick between hot flesh. He devoured that mouth like a fruit, biting and bruising, but finding no core. He reveled in the sensation of punctuated touch, clasping Tyto to him again and again, anxious that his body might melt away into the intangible dark. And although Tyto gave nothing of himself in return, Channard discovered his own lust reflected back in his body like a mirror for desire, crushed down upon him, atop him, inside him.

When the crisis came, it passed through the room like echoing thunder, shaking him to his center.

He licked the sweat from the back of Tyto's neck and moved off of him with one lingering caress over his head.

Tyto sat up slowly, and pieced the bed of rags that was the remnants of his clothing back around himself with drug-clumsy fingers. He shone in the dark like his amulet, with a light that gave off no light. Panting, Channard peeled those leaves of cloth back away from his body and drew him close. Albans' body flexed and his hands clawed at him, but weakly, thoroughly drugged. Channard caressed his body in the dark, removing the shards of Tyto's clothing even as he attempted to put them back on. Tyto stopped, let Channard touch him then, and only when his hands ceased to define and possess him did he manage to dress once more.

It had been pleasurable enough, Channard decided, but the pleasure had passed too quickly and left behind an ache and emptiness like a pulled tooth. Despite how much he had wanted it, it hadn't satisfied him. It had only left him emptier. Clothed, violated, Tyto curled up on the floor and lay there like a dead fly.

"I'm… Tyto, I'm sorry."

Tyto opened one eye, his owl's eye, and showed him only contempt and boredom. _So this had been expected, even this_. "No," he said. He turned his face on the tile floor to cool his bruised ear.

Channard stretched out over him on his hands and knees and stroked his head. "If you'd only reach out to me, touch me, let me love you… it wouldn't be so terrible. I could make you feel good."

"Never," he said. Channard watched him blink his eyes and move his fingers over the seams in the tiles, flex the bones in his slow thighs, as if he were literally diagnosing his flesh and what sedation, and Channard, had done to it.

"I didn't mean it," Channard said.

"Oh, you didn't?" Albans smiled through the pain. "You look stupid." States of emotion flashed across his face in slow waves. "My kingdom and you, which is the more rotten? What else could you do? You have nothing more to give."

With calm hands, Channard dressed himself. He felt the accusation precisely in that empty place where his feelings ought to have been. _Don't you know me?_ asked that empty place. _I am shame, the burning sister of desire. Feel me. I am shame. How could you have done this?_

He had to give him something. Some… some gift. What did he have to give? All he had was Radamanthus. _Then give him that_, screeched shame. _Give him something. Give him time away from you. And you from him. You're going to kill him if you stay this close!_

"Would you like to spend time in the common room, Tyto? With my other patients?"

Tyto looked at him, face blank.

September arrived.


	7. The Kingdom of Madness

He watched Tyto Albans in the common room for a week, a month, meeting him face to face rarely. But Channard felt he grew to understand his pet creature better through observation than through all of the reluctant, rancorous, evasive conversations they had before.

Of course, the first morning, in the common-room, Tyto had efficiently rushed the open doors, as naturally as a ball rolling down an incline. The two guards posted there had almost let him pass in their surprise. Tyto had been indifferently struck down to the floor, Channard had sedated him, and it had been two days before he returned, when he had again rushed the doors, again beaten, again sedated. On the fifth day, Channard instructed that the doors be locked, and Tyto, momentarily surprised by the lack of countermoves by the guards, had burned both palms on the metal of the door-handles, and then stood there, for hours, staring blankly at the egress. Channard, watching all of this, secluded in the recessed observation booth, had alone carefully noted the slight forward tilt of Alban's head, signifying resignation and defeat.

On the sixth day, Tyto did not rush the doors. He stood, alone, in his tailor-knotted motley, and _observed_. Channard saw him see every portal, every nook, every path in the place that might lead away. Saw him see each window thrice barred with iron lattice, iron bars, steel padlocks. Saw him look over the other patients, seeing the weak amenities available, embodied in threadbare and shabby furniture, in games and puzzles, most with crucial pieces missing, spread insipidly over battered tables and clutched in medication-palsied hands, saw him cock an ear at the ancient PA system which was tinnily blaring out-of-date music, and cut his eyes precisely, and exactly, to the high concealed niches of the mirrored observation booth windows, as if they did not exist, and look at Channard.

"Do not forget that I do not forget," his eyes seemed to say, and then he turned his back to him and looked at the other peasants in the Kingdom of Madness.

Channard had expected Tyto to react in servile terror and disgust when the more engaged patients approached him in curiosity, hands outstretched to greet and touch. Channard did not particularly mind if Tyto were to react with violence, hurting them. He even smugly anticipated such a scene. But Tyto did not hurt the others, even when they put their hands on him, on his shoulders, his arm, even the hair of his head. Neither did he encourage them. He let the strange hands linger, then lifted them gently away at the wrists, spoke a few words to each too low to hear over the zoo-din of the common room, the music, and the plate glass of the observation windows. The ones he allowed to touch him went away, satisfied, their eyes brighter, their bodies more controlled and graceful than should have been possible for their circumstances. Only the few who approached him aggressively, or sexually—Haansen, who had raped and murdered two male prostitutes, or Reed, the paedophile, or Kara, who had facially disfigured her "whore daughter" with a paring knife—received a less inspiring reaction. Those strong talon-like hands prized first one caressing limb, next one aggressive jab, and then one too-familiar overflung arm from his body, biting into fabric and flesh, accompanied with a look and a word apparently more frightening than any violence to the receiver, movements invisible to the guards but easily seen from Channard's perch. These few never approached Tyto again, perpetually orbiting to the points of the room furthest from him, but naturally, casually, like identical poles of a magnet.

After the first few days, Tyto did more than stand in the center of the common room and observe. He began to be with them.

He moved with that confident swiftness, as he had toward the door on the first day, but in the direction of a table where a group of heavily sedated inmates were putting together a puzzle. The guards, seeing his movement, flinched with care, remembering. Channard was gratified to see their vigilance, and reminded himself to praise their poise. But Tyto seemed to slow as he approached the group, his movements becoming as languid as theirs. He waited a full minute before pulling out a chair and sitting with them, sorting through the jumble of printed cardboard pieces as painstakingly slowly as they did. He watched with some bemused surprise when Tyto lit the cigarettes of those whose bodies shook too much to do it for themselves, surprised and displeased when, on occasion, Tyto would accept and smoke a cigarette from another, as if accepting such things was normal, as if what Channard had given him, put into him, was of no consequence.

Channad flinched when, on the fifth day of the interminable puzzle, Tyto laughed aloud at some inane joke the man to his left had made. The entire room pricked up its ears, condensed a step toward the epicenter of pleasure-sound echoing from Tyto's slim throat. And Channard burned with longing jealousy. He had had the orderlies take Albans abruptly from the room and sedate him, as punishment. While they clutched him from the room, Tyto tilted his head up and gave Channard, through the mirrored glass, a romantic smile.

He could see that Tyto Albans was inhuman. What he hadn't anticipated was that his inhumanity could be congruous to the sub-humanity of the fellow-inmates who shared his captivity. It was fascinating, and not displeasing, and it scratched maddening itch to know that he could rain down separation and soporific drugs on his pet creature whenever he chose. He comforted himself with the knowledge that, like God, he could give in order to take away.

Last of all the windows Tyto Albans discovered was the television set, normally kept locked away in a supply closet until after the bland lunch and light sedation of the afternoon. Albans hadn't made its acquaintance until the end of his second week in the common room. He had come into the common room first on that day, and halted when he saw it, as if it were an unknown and unpredictable, possibly aggressive fellow-prisoner. Channard found it amusing to see Albans so disconcerted. The set was tuned to one of the bland, popular Proctor & Gamble dramatic serials marketed to housewives. Albans circled the room around it, taking the longest serpentine method, seeming both drawn to and afraid of it. After fifteen minutes of this careful dance, he came very close to the screen, tapping it and flinching away. He stood back and looked through the screen with an intensity Channard had only known children to possess, and watched the narrative unfold, aptly mimicking the common gestures and poses of the actors. He shivered at the first commercial break, looking around to see if the story he'd been so focused on had moved somewhere outside the screen.

A few of the regular TV-addicted patients, coming into the common room, had allowed this to go on, but now one came up to the set, nudging Tyto out of the way, obviously demanding to change the channel to a different program. Albans waited and watched, and then himself fiddled with the dials, and, pressing the power switch, turned it off.

Tyto Albans stared into the empty screen. It had gone black, becoming an opaque mirror. Channard saw him see his own reflection—for the first time? He moved his face forward, and then back, tilted his face one way and the other, seeing himself in the convex glass of the crystal tube. He stared into his mortal eye and then into his dark one. He touched his hand to his face, then pressed his fingers deep into his cheek. And he backed away from the dead television in sorrow and bewilderment. As he moved, he kept glancing into the mirror of the set, and finally collapsed hard into a couch against the side wall. His aspect remained aggrieved even as one of the other patients, in disgust, turned the television back on, adjusted the dials and antenna, just in time for the announcer's voice to inform the audience that this was _THE SECRET STORM_.

From behind the protective wall of his knees locked inside the circle of his arms, Albans suspiciously watched the electric window, the human puppet-show, the soap opera-as if the knowledge of these banal domestic dramas were painful, and necessary.

Channard touched the glass, wishing he held that same bewitching power, could provoke fear and fascination-could provoke any response. He ached for Tyto's regard. But to him, now, Tyto was as cold and opaque as smoked glass.

When he saw another receive the attention and love he felt was his by right, he drank deep of the Hate River, and prepared to drown her in his vomit.


	8. The Handmaiden's Solace

In the third week of Tyto's gentle, undemanding reign over the common room, she came among the supplicants who gathered to greet him when he arrived. At first she did not approach, merely stood on the periphery of the gathered throng, moving away before a part in the crowd would allow him to touch her with his eyes. She had that shy daring of one who knows herself utterly unworthy of love but still compelled to obey its dictates.

Medea was the nickname Channard had given her; she had murdered her infant son and attempted to murder her husband, whose strength had prevailed and sent her to earth at the Radamanthus Asylum. Her actual name was Maryam Billings. Channard had reviewed her file when she began to show especial interest in his pet, but taken little notice of her otherwise. Half-Japanese, which Channard understood was an unacceptable condition among those people, she had been born in one of the internment camps during WWII. A classic case of post-partum depression and untreated mania, she was most often lapsed into dead-eyed catatonia. In the exquisite artistry of her outré heritage, women were pale and coiffed. Medea was dark, unkempt, and gross.

As days progressed, Medea began to follow him, the way a cat who loves a person will obliquely follow the object of her affection from room to room, never letting more than five yards distance elapse between. She would later sit, kneeling on her heels like a nun at prayer, a few feet behind his chair. Tyto seemed to take no notice of this worshipful homage, but Channard knew he knew. Tyto observed everything.

In the third week, she was never more than a foot behind him, at his right shoulder if he was standing, at his right knee if he sat. And like a person who loves a cat, his movements demonstrated a gentle awareness of her presence. When he moved to sit at a table, he slid into his chair from the left-hand side. When he decided to stand up, he made a decisive gesture with his right hand over the table, a signal to her that he was going to move, giving her space and time to rise and attend before he pushed back his chair. When he watched the television in the afternoon-never without a face full of suspicious amazement-she stood respectfully behind whatever couch or chair he had retreated to.

One morning at a lethargic game of checkers, Tyto carefully passed a gifted cigarette, out of which he had taken a polite draught, down to her. Medea did not smoke it, but held it between her finger and thumb like a religious offering, a tiny censer wafting smoke over her face and hair, until the coal met the filter. He had taken it back and crushed it out couthly in the moment before it burned her, and then run a hand over her forehead in a gesture which should have been proprietary and unsuitable, and yet was not. It was a clean gesture, like a priest laying a blessing over a novitiate. Her eyes and her body had kindled with sudden joy. Channard briefly saw how others could find her beautiful, but himself did not.

In the fourth week, Medea would arrive first in the common room, her breakfast obviously choked quickly down or eschewed altogether. She would stand and wait, patient as perfect faith, at the place where Tyto always stood for his morning survey of the common room. And when he arrived, his handmaiden would carefully adjust the knots that held his slapdash tattered clothing in place, neatly adjust a fold of sleeve or collar. Somewhere she had acquired a broken-toothed plastic comb, and held it up in front of him, as she had the votive cigarette. He inclined his head to her in noble condescension, and allowed her to run the grotty thing over the three-inch-long silver-gold cap of hair that now covered his naked skull, making gentle static furrows over his scalp. He touched her cheek, gently, as if to thank her for her _petit lever_, and she moved back to allow any of the supplicants to come forward for their morning greeting. There was less of that crowd-to-king nonsense, Channard was happy to observe, but more of a disquieting sense of wakefulness and individuality among the patients, where before there had been a unified cacophony of jagged chaos. Still, Medea attended upon him.

His dislike for this undemonstrative relationship stirred the muck-pools of his poisonous psyche, and he brooded on them. He did not summon Tyto for an examination or an interview. Let them think themselves safe. Let them think themselves alone in the world. He wanted to see how much Tyto would forget to remember.

One morning, Medea wasn't there. Tyto waited patiently for her after his morning survey and greetings, not moving to any of the smaller circles of conversation, games, diversions. He waited, standing in place just as he had done on the fifth day, observing the environment for any breath or glimpse of his handmaiden with the same intensity in which he had once looked for means of escape. She arrived in late morning, heavy-lidded, clumsy in body and giving off the faint crackling aura of a post-electroshock patient.

Tyto had gone to her with that peculiar loose-limbed swiftness, and then blended his body movements, even his pattern of breathing, to hers. Not touching her, he instead moved his arm around her narrow shoulders, a shield that guided but did not command. He led her to a low couch, and two of the other patients made way for them, gave them what little privacy could be given in the common room. He helped her sit, and then he kneeled beside her on the floor, as a knight in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and gazed up at her calmly. He put his hands out to hers, hovering over her, and stroked them twice, gently. Channard saw his lips forming words spoken just for her, saw the vibration at Tyto's throat which seemed not to stop. He was singing to her. _Singing_.

As with the one time when Tyto had laughed—a singular event never repeated, Channard remembered with satisfaction, as he had taught his pet creature a valuable lesson—the population of the common room seemed to condense and contract around the sound of him, and grow gradually quiet.

The tinny blaring of the piped-in music couldn't quite overcome the sound of Tyto's voice. He was singing wordlessly with it, harmonizing with it, turning a canned and overplayed musical lyric into something free, and strange. There was magic in that voice.

He stroked each of Medea's fingers from wrist to tip, and then stopped singing and looked her in the face, his eyes mirroring the burned-out hurt in hers. Ho only looked, saying nothing. He looked at her for a long time, searching, waiting.

_What does she see when she looks in his eyes?_

She must have seen something, or only finally become aware that the object of her faithful heart's desire was kneeling, and to her. The stiffness of her misery stretched and poured free under that gaze. When her tears came, Tyto rested his head upon her knees and clasped her legs to him. Slowly, with pain, Medea stroked his hair with a touch as gentle as his own. The common room began to buzz and hum again as the inmates pointedly, kindly ignored the tender scene in the corner.


	9. The Covenant Configuration

"You must stop burning her, Doctor-Phillip-Channard," Tyto said, his voice once more with those qualities of anger and defiance that had been so long lacking.

"Hmm?" Channard smiled pleasantly. It had cost him to hold off on summoning his pet for this interview, knowing that Tyto would, at last, long to dicker and fence with him.

Tyto paced around his office, stopped in front of the bookshelf, and flung one book from it to the floor.

"Stop!" Channard commanded him. Tyto's face moved from fury to bland amusement as he took another book and dangled it from its spine over the lip of the shelf.

"Stop," Channard said more calmly, and Tyto scowled and flicked the book off the edge. And then he took up a third, and hurled it at Channard's face. Channard was able to parry just in time, slapping the book down to his desk.

"Her. Burning her! Stop burning her!" Tyto faced him across his desk and touched his hands to his temples. "Here, and here. The marks, like those you put on me! She came in smelling like burnt flesh and piss. You did it. No one else would."

"You think I'm doing it to be cruel?"

"You think I don't know how cruel you are?"

"Medea—Maryam. She's ill, Tyto, and the prescribed treatment is electroshock. I turn on the power and run the current through her like the television set, and it switches off her depression." Channard smiled coyly. "She's had electroshock before. Many times."

"But not since I've been here. She isn't sick. She's… lost. Sad. She doesn't need a cure for feeling sad. Only a monster wouldn't feel sad here."

"Are you sad, Tyto?"

"Oh, fuck you!" Channard smothered a smile. Albans had apparently learned some vulgarities in the common room. "We're not talking about _me_. We're talking about _her_. You're supposed to heal people, not cook them from the inside."

"So much anger on the behalf of one human female," Channard said benevolently. He handed the projectile book to Tyto, who reshelved it. "Why do you care?"

"I don't know." He fisted and flexed his hands.

"Feeling pity?"

Albans spread his arms in a pose of exasperation.

"You shouldn't." Channard stood and unlocked his filing cabinet, took her case file out and spread it over the blotter. "She stabbed her innocent eight-month-old baby. She attempted to stab her husband, a decent provider and upstanding member of the community. Found not guilty by reason of insanity. Four suicide attempts in the past calendar year, three of those before I began to give her treatment. I'm doing the right thing for her, trust me."

"You've got to stop giving her electroshock treatments, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. She is pregnant. Oh-my-blighted-keeper, haven't you seen any of this?" Tyto's voice was a whipcrack of anger. "You are her doctor. Or am I the only of your captives to receive any attention?"

"Is it yours?" Channard asked with interest, and wondered where they might have found the time and space to make sex possible.

"Yes," Tyto hissed, but it was not a confirmation, not exactly. He turned and stared at Channard. "You'd like that, wouldn't you, a child of my race to fiddle around with? I cannot claim the honor of quickening her. Ask your orderlies where the child comes from. Some of them are fond of rape. She herself has trouble remembering. You run the electricity through her brain and it burns out everything but the pain."

"You're right, of course, Tyto. You've distracted me from my other responsibilities. I'll examine Medea tomorrow. If she's more than three months along, an abortion would be out of the question. But a transorbital lobotomy would be effective in treating her, and pose no danger to the fetus. She might even be able to be released, to stand trial for her crimes, or be transferred to a lower-security installation for imbeciles."

"Transorbital lobotomy?"

"Yes." He reached out and tapped Tyto briskly on his eyelid. "I take a metal skewer and hammer it through the eyesocket, to the very center of the brain. The procedure is quite simple. I'm capable of performing it myself. The patients who receive the treatment are greatly changed. She won't be Medea any longer. But she could carry to term and deliver a completely healthy baby, even with a hole in her brain."

"Forget about the baby," Tyto snarled. "What must I do to persuade you to value _her_?"

He felt giddy. It had been difficult to coerce Tyto without causing any permanent bodily damage, but now it seemed as though he might exert some pressure by threatening Medea. "I don't know, Tyto. What can you offer me?"

Tyto paused, laid a finger against his nose and turned his face aside in disgust. "I don't know. What do you want?"

"Another like you, Tyto. Can you give me that? Can you summon another of your kind here?" Channard imagined what he could discover about that other race if he could collect samples of brain tissue, cerebro-spinal fluid, biopsy, amputation…and keep Tyto inviolate.

"I'd need my amulet to summon another. And you wouldn't relish it." He gave Channard an evaluating look. "My own people are beyond your ken, and beyond your ability to control."

"I control you, Tyto."

Tyto gave him a look of such towering contempt that it felt like a blow. "I came by choice. _My_ choice. Everything you have from me I've chosen to give you. I've been generous. The others of my make? "For what you've done, they would be. . . ungenerous. Better not risk it, Doctor-Phillip-Channard."

"Perhaps I could use you to make a hybrid. If I brought you a woman, would you be fertile with her?"

"With a human?" That same tone he had used in their first days, as if Channard had suggested copulating with a pile of particularly moist and fungent garbage. "I wouldn't know where to begin."

"There are myriad stories of your kind cross-breeding with human beings, Tyto."

"How wonderful for them." But whether Tyto meant the humans, the fae, or their offspring, Channard wasn't certain. He looked at Channard. "I can heal her, if you stop burning her?"

Channard laughed politely, declining the bargain.

"No? Then how about magic?"

"Magic," said Channard, feeling the word with his tongue. He considered this carefully. "Magic is something you've been careful to conceal from me, but I suspect you're capable of doing more than walking up walls in defiance of gravity."

"Oh yes," Tyto Albans said. "That's only a very small part of what I can do. How would you learn my magic?"

"It depends," Channard said, "On the magic."

"Let me demonstrate. With your permission, of course." He bowed his head in ironic servility.

Channard waved his hand. "Granted."

"The first magic is the power of the name. There are two names inside you, Doctor-Phillip-Channard, and I can read them both." Tyto wrapped his arms around himself and stood very straight. He stroked his hands and forearms in complex gestures. He juggled the empty air, folding it first one way, then another. "There are two paths laid out before you, and each is a name. There are others, but these are the two most likely. In the first, the magic I teach you lets you stop your inquiries here. You give me my amulet, and let me go. You become quite ordinary. You turn your back on me. You become a skilled but unappreciated physician, healing the sick and accruing very little power, dying in comfortable mediocrity at an old age with few regrets or triumphs to your name. A happy life, and a boring one.

"In the second, ah. " Tyto smiled. "Your lust and pride are magnificent, but they could be purified to further heights. Transcendent heights. The sufferings you might engender could become legendary, even in Hell. You would be seen. You could be known. You could be great. You could become a god." He folded out one naked hand toward Channard, offering and begging in one palm.

"There are many doors into the labyrinths, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. I could train you for your trials, help you to your destination, whichever one you choose. The Healer, or the Hierophant." The air shimmered in his grip, resolving into the shape of a dilated pupil, a dark screen.

Channard stared into the un-shadow of the crystal in Tyto Albans' hand. For a moment, he looked. He could become one of the heroes of the mortal world. He could bring back wisdom that was not so much lost as un-remembered, with either path he chose.

To be the Healer—he looked and saw that the path was fraught with discipline and self-control, learning to leash his appetites and ambitions. The thorn in his side would be the memory of magic deferred. It would be a path through the ordinary world, one which would require him to turning away from Tyto Albans. And his legacy would be built in service to others. Channard was tempted by the path for one moment, and then scorned it. Who had ever heard of Prospero after he drowned his books and broke his staff?

The orb turned. To be the Hierophant-He saw himself seated in power and glory, with the fear and anguish of thousands of supplicant souls dancing attendance upon him. Ageless, deathless, with no check on his sadism or power. _But the price_. He dimly saw that snares beset the path to the throne, blades of blood and steel wire. And he would have to endure the pain of the hardships that could not be avoided along the way. He saw that he might even go through the degradation and dissolution of that other world in equivalent measure to that which Tyto had already gone through in Channard's mortal world. And that frightened him.

For one honest moment, he knew himself to be an abject coward, weak, and ignorant, sustained only with his own pride and low hungers. He would never be capable of greatness. Better to take the easier path.

And then that moment passed—he smothered it. Surely there might be a way to bypass the tricks and snares of the other world. Didn't he have his own Virgil at his disposal, to lead the way? With Albans chained to him, he could cheat his way through. Channard, embarrassed at his own arrogance, pretended that he could be a theft-hero, one who like Prometheus could steal from the gods, steal what he knew could only be earned. _Yes_, that arrogant voice assured him. Prometheus, or Hermes, who traversed the borders of power at will and was always forgiven his thieving because of his beauty and outrageous daring_. I will be Prometheus_, he thought, and remembered to forget the price Prometheus had, eventually, paid.

"This is the first part of what I could teach you," Albans said. "To see, and to follow the paths to your goal. Give me my amulet in exchange for a name. The path you choose determines everything else." He was as coldly serious as a statue of Justice.

"You're not getting your amulet," he said with some heat. "This is all talk, Tyto. Show me something I can truly see."

Tyto tossed the shadow into the air and the room was transformed. Cold fire crept up the walls from the darkness of the corners. Where the flames licked, brambles of gold threw out branches and runners that poured forth sparkling dust and liquid gilt. There was a pattern to it, one that defined notches and seams of latitude and longitude within the box of the room. These seams split and threw out gaps of utter blackness. Channard felt the floor drop, and rise, and spin. He grabbed the edge of his desk to steady himself. Tyto, the fulcrum of this motion, the hub of the wheel, was merely standing there.

An iron bell tolled.

"Illusion!" Channard shouted.

"No," said Tyto. "It's not." A portal cracked itself open wide between his bookshelves. In the blue shadowy corridors beyond, things stirred and approached.

"This is your door, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. Now that it's opened, will you go through? The way I did? Naked and afraid?"

"You'll go with me," Channard demanded, and stood up—but only to back away. Cool mist crept into his office. He stared, horrified, at the dark doorways, and the nightmare pathways of stair and tunnel that opened beyond. There were things stirring there, things of shadow and polished steel walking there, and a dark light that struck his face and plucked memories from his brain like stringed instruments. He saw himself there clearly. There was weakness and little empathy, and the towering monument of all his sins, great and little. This place would flay his soul. "You'll go with me!" He was terrified. In the ghost-breath of the door, little creatures skittered and stirred.

"I can't go with you. You've bound me to this world, don't you recall?"

The books in the bookshelves shuddered in their places. Channard looked over and caught motion out of the corner of his eyes, but nothing had moved. His peripheral vision saw a cluster of dark knotty-jointed things crawling over his desk, but when he focused on them, they were gone. He looked back up at Tyto. "What's that? What-what are they?"

"A consistency of little minds, adored by doctors and divines." Tyto smiled. Channard's chair squeaked, as if something malicious and clever were climbing up its leather back, and he heard a wheezy laugh near his ear. The stink of its breath remained, but when he flinched to look, there was nothing. "Goblins. Loupka. Nisse. The little people."

"Are they—are they real? Send them away," he said. His blotter had been ripped to shreds, silently, in the moment he'd looked away, and stacked into neat anatomical pieces in the shape of a penis. The folder empty, Maryam's file torn to confetti.

"But they've been so anxious to see me," Tyto said, with deadly conviviality. "And you let me open the door for them." There was a cacophony of mad laughter from little throats behind him, and Tyto smiled in kinship with the laughter. Channard whipped his head around to look, but there was nothing there, only movement around the periphery, in the shadows of the room, horrifying movement. "They want to meet you."

"I don't want to meet them!" Channard shouted, swiping the mess of paper from his desk. "Close the door!"

The sweeping un-light poured over the room, and faded, and all looked normal once more. There was the sound of skittering feet, and that horrifying presence of demonic goblins faded.

Channard blinked. Tyto put his hands across the desk and leaned forward until their faces were only a foot apart. "Come, come now. How can you expect to be a magician if you can't exercise a little curiousity and adaptability? Perhaps the hard path to power isn't for you after all," Tyto mocked.

Channard swallowed. The click of his dry throat was audible in the silence.

"I don't like to see her with you," said Channard. He was embarrassed with his own pettiness. He blushed, and tried to summon back his authority. "I want you to keep away from her. Do that, and teach me magic. And I'll spare her." Even as he spoke, he saw Tyto shaking his head in disgust.

"You," said Tyto, "are very small for your age and ambition. I'm disappointed in you, Doctor-Phillip-Channard." The iron bell sounded again. "Teaching you magic will be very difficult. Getting you into the labyrinth will be even harder. But I'll teach you all you'll need, and help you on your way. If."

"If I give you the woman."

"No!" Tyto laughed as if Channard had said something ridiculous. "Give me thirteen days. Thirteen days to repair the labyrinth of her mind. You may watch, but not interfere. If I succeed, she will be free. No power could constrain her."

"And if you fail?" said Channard, wondering what he might possibly have to gain.

"Then she still goes free. Send her away. I won't think about her again. And you can have everything you want from me. _Everything_." Tyto smiled his romantic smile. "I'll be your bed-toy, play your mind-games, instruct you in magic, satisfy your lusts in all the permutations of flesh and spirit. I will be eager, and obedient. I will become your slave." Tyto lowered his head, rolled his shoulder in anticipation of erotic submission, the bend of his neck in promise of anguished pleasure. "If that happens, the goblins will have to find their own solution to the Collapse of Good Governance. Because if I submit to you, then I am unworthy to be a King." He turned his body and was upright and proud again.

"Before I agree, I want to know why. Are you doing all this just to intimidate me? To try to frighten me?" Channard was utterly baffled. "Why Maryam Billings? What makes her special among all the others here?"

Tyto looked equally baffled. He looked up into the light, not seeing it. His mortal pupil contracted to a pin and he bared his teeth, chewed the air with them as if biting the question into fragments. Finally he looked back at Channard.

"She came and gave me everything she had. She serves me like a king, or a god, in perfect loyalty and faith." He shook his head, his face in pain. "She asks for nothing. _Nothing_. Her… her devotion to me demands that I reciprocate." His eyes traced a path up the wall and the ceiling as if he might at any moment step along it in defiance of gravity and physics. "Bargains and exchanges, Doctor-Phillip-Channard." And finally Tyto looked tired. "I may never leave this place. But I can make a way out for her."

"Then I agree," Channard said. "Thirteen days. And then you're mine." 

* * *

_(**Author's note**: Tyto Albans' definition of goblins is taken from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Are you still with me? The second spiral is opening for our hero. Please leave me a review.)_


	10. Meander's Queen-The Labyrinth

_(**Author's Note**: _Labyrinth_ scholars will easily recognize the names of Linda, Jeremy, and Robert Williams, as well as the famous speech "Through Dangers Untold" as belonging to Jim Henson and Terry Jones. _Labyrinth_ Ph. Ds will recognize the titles "Meander's Queen" and "Robin Zakar." These characters and names belong to their respective authors: Laura Phillips, Terry Jones, Dennis Lee, and the incomparable Jim Henson. _

_Italicized speeches attributed to Caliban are from William Shakespeare's_ Tempest_._

The character Jones, the orderly, is lifted from the film Sucker Punch_. He's despicable and deserves much worse than what Tyto does to him.  
_

_Lyric lines are distorted (or mirrored) cribs from David Bowie's "Underground," as is Tyto's melody._

_We're very close to freedom now. Tell me if you saw the tricks that Channard missed. Prince of Owls, Uncrowned King, is a marvelous magician.)_

He saw him spread his wings above her, and hood her from harm. He saw him grasp her firmly in his talons, and never scratch her skin.

It began very quietly, and easily, the next day, the first of thirteen days. When she came into the common room, after Channard's cursory examination, Tyto Albans was there waiting for her. She rushed to him, embarrassed by being late. His clothing was perfectly in place, and his hair combed. She gave him a look of confusion, and held up the comb. He took it gently and offered it to her, speaking a few soft words. He went and sat on his customary couch, tossed a pillow down to the floor, and beckoned her to him.

She came, of course she came, and sat, ungracefully, between his knees. She flinched and trembled when he lifted the tangled mess of her bramblethorn hair and felt, with his fingers, the potential paths to order. She darted quick and nervous looks up at him, as if she were committing a horrendous breach of etiquette. But he only smiled down at her, such a friendly smile. He eased her head down to rest on his knee and piled the wealth of her elf-locked head over his lap. Slowly, her eyes eased half-shut as she lost herself in the world of his comfortable touch. In the second hour, when she heaved a great sigh and eased back against him, hugging his thigh with both arms, he ran his hand from the roots of her forehead to the very tip as if to praise her for her courage. She twitched her eyebrows occasionally when there was an accidental tug, but then Tyto rubbed the hurt place with little circles of his thumb, and kept going. At intervals he ran his tongue over the teeth of the comb and dampened his spittle down the length of an untangled tress.

He never gave any sign of being aware of Channard spying, or of anyone or anything else in the common room. It was if they were under glass, inviolate, only her, only him, and the task at hand.

As he combed, things came loose from her. The strands of intermixed torn hair he ate as they came free. Channard gagged slightly the first time Albans did this. He remembered the stench of her, unwashed and unhygienic and dirty, and gagged harder. But Tyto ate the bits of her with relish, ate even the pieces that weren't properly part of her, but had been mixed in with the tangles—lint, ragged strings, even once a paperclip and a hairpin, though the metal must have agonized him going down. The utter shamelessness of them both was … it should have been disgusting. But the shame was beyond the wall of glass, with Channard. Finally the weed-patch of Medea's hair was a black river, thick and strong as a horse's tail. That black river spread out his blue-black kilt, crested in waves of order.

She wasn't asleep. She'd given herself completely over to his care, but was awake and aware for every moment. When he began to comb the length of her, all from scalp to tip, their faces were reflections pleasure and mutual trust. He gathered the heavy weight of it in both hands, and coiled it carefully over her shoulder. He put his hand over the crown of her head, shifted his legs to support her, and waited for her to close her eyes and sleep. He closed his eyes as well, but Channard sensed, even though he saw Tyto's eyelids flicker in the pattern of REM sleep at the same time as Medea's, that he wasn't sleeping, or at least not dreaming his own dreams. The afternoon bled away in a spiral of themselves. Neither moved until the room closed for that day.

"What does she dream of?" he asked Tyto that evening.  
"Nothing you're capable of observing," Tyto said. "Remember our bargain. Don't interfere."

On the second day, the pattern continued in the path Tyto had set. He combed her hair, and then began to braid and twine it in four and eight and five-part strands, creating complicated knots and designs echoed in his own clothing. As he braided, he asked her questions. To some of these, she raised her head, interested, answered in monosyllables. To the rest, she said nothing, only looked out of her eyes with that habitual expression of blank hurt. When the hurt came into her face, Tyto laid his hand over her forehead until it passed.

Channard observed that when she responded to a question as he braided, he finished the arrangement and knotted it over upon itself. When she didn't, he would spend more time than he had creating the knot in undoing it and combing it free. By the end of the second day, a third of her hair hung over her shoulder in arcane designs.

"What do you ask her?" he demanded of Tyto Albans.  
"I ask her who she is."

On the third day, when she refused to answer a question, Tyto undid the knot and then tugged cruelly on the empty skein of hair until she opened her mouth to speak. The questions came at slower intervals, but when they did, she began to spit her words with some heat, in fuller sentences. The last coil of the day, she turned and glared at him with an expression of righteous anger Channard had only ever seen on Tyto's face before. Her chest heaved in passion, and he thought for a moment that Medea might strike out. But Tyto only nodded in impartial acknowledgement, and finished the knot.

"Why do you hurt her?" Channard asked.  
"Her silence is a tangle that must be undone. She must claim her anger, even if it's painful. It must needs shake free with her voice."

On the fourth day, Tyto came very close to murdering one of the orderlies. It happened in the afternoon. Instead of being taken to the common room after the men's lunch, Jones had decided to take Tyto to the showers for a private conversation. Medea had waited impatiently for Albans to return to her, moving around the common room like an angry cat, searching for him everywhere, and Channard knew something was wrong. What he'd found, when he'd gone looking with Hobart and a guard in tow, was Albans and Jones in the deserted showers. Albans was coolly fitting Jones' keys into the lock, fingers smoking from the metal, searching for the right one. He backed away respectfully when Channard and his entourage entered. Jones was in the corner with his face ash-pale and his blood on the tiles, holding his guts in his abdominal cavity with both hands. Albans had apparently attempted to eviscerate him. "Send him to the common room," he barked, holding out his hand to Tyto, who grinned and gave him Jones' keys.

"You sure 'bout that, Doctor?" Hobart asked.

"I'm sure," Channard said, disgusted. "You, help me get Jones to surgery. Don't question me." The balance of that afternoon was spent in patching up the orderly and pouring blood, anesthetic, and antibiotics into him.

"So you've discovered the father of Medea's baby," Channard sneered at Albans that evening.

"I've discovered the one who raped her. He didn't like me being close to her. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? He wanted to convince me that he should be able to rape her again. He was asking my _permission_. I said _no_. It felt quite good to open him up." Tyto was cheerful, and Channard thought he could still see the blood on his hands. "Did he die?"

"No, he'll live, and barely have a scar. You were quite neat. But this will cause trouble, Tyto, you realize that."

"Only for him. Dismiss him. I'm sure you don't like sharing the watering hole with other predators. And if I have opportunity to be alone with him again, I'll kill him. That would be more trouble for you than for me. After all, I'm a madman. One must make excuses for madmen; I've seen it on the vile teevee. Otherwise what am I doing here?"

"I can't have you going around disemboweling the employees!" Channard snapped. "This is the last one."

"As you say, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. I solemnly promise that I will only disembowel those who try to get between me and my work." He bared his teeth. _Who was he? This ghoul_?

When she entered on the fifth day, her hair hung in ordered lover's-knots down her back, every hair claimed in the complex configuration; it was a symbolic maze of questions and answers that Channard couldn't decipher. She came to him, and Tyto removed her grubby sweater and picked the threads of it apart with his fingers. He slit the sleeves and the waist of her nightgown with those talon-nails and interwove the cotton and the wool back over her breasts and belly so that she was dressed as he was, but as a woman. Channard sneered at them, the dressing of the wren in peacock-feathers, and he saw how alike they were. The way they touched—even as he hatefully envied them in their cozy nest together, he could see it wasn't sexual, quite. Albans touched Medea as a Germanic hero might have touched his sister, with intimacy and without desire. And when she was all knotted snug in her new clothing, he could see—couldn't not see—how round and high her belly was, how her flesh was firm, breasts heavy and full with pregnancy, and how the reweaving of the sweater and the cotton supported her back and proudly accentuated her condition like the filigree setting of a jewel. Albans drew her hands over herself, helping her assume the iconic and timeless pose of expectant motherhood. He spoke to her. She put her hands over her face in anger and despair, but he moved her arms again, gently, despite her resistance. She nodded, and he stroked her face in empathy.

That day, they sat upon the couch side-by-side, like a King and Queen in state, saying nothing, but slowly drawing closer to each other, until their clothing and their arms and their hair seemed to intertwine, a double-spiral of dark and light. Her lips moved and his did not, and she whispered to him for a long time, two pairs of eyes fixed on some middle distance of the infinite. They seemed lost in nothingness, but Channard felt, he felt… that they were both seeing some far shore, a chasm-rift that separated them both from their freedom.

On the sixth day, they watched, together, a broadcast of a local production of _The Tempest_. And this time it was Tyto's lips that moved, asking questions, repeating lines, laughing at the clowns, and brooding on the soliloquies of Caliban.

"Well," said Channard that evening. "I see you've come to appreciate literature. Maybe when this nonsense is over you'll apply yourself more carefully to learning to read."

"Why bother?" Albans scoffed. "You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

"So you identify with Caliban, and not Ariel?"

"Ariel served his master, and Caliban defied him."

"Ariel won his freedom."

"Ariel bent the knee and begged to get what was always his by right. Caliban did neither and had back his island. The isle '_full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.' _Caliban got his isle back, like a sleeper who in dreaming, sees the clouds '_open and show riches ready to drop upon him that, when he waked, he cried to dream again_.'"

"I could always sedate you again, if it's dreams you want," Channard said angrily.

"But I'm not the dreamer," Tyto said. "Not anymore. All the dreams are hers now. And you'll not touch her."

On the seventh day, Channard realized that Tyto might actually know what he was doing, and could actually succeed in his task.

Medea began to write.

Tyto Albans had brought Channard's unloved and unused composition book and—smuggled or begged from someone else—three ballpoint pens to the common room. He pushed them over to her on the low table before their couch and leaned back.

They talked for a long time then, a very serious conversation. They told jokes to each other, laughed with each other. And in the fourth hour, Medea uncapped one of the pens, opened the naked pages, and began to write. She curled up with the book wedged between her lap and her belly, and rested her feet on Tyto's lap. He rubbed them as they talked. She would pause in her writing, look up, and say something to him. And then he would say something back. She would write a bit more, or scribble something out, ask a question, hear an answer. Writing. For a few hours only, she wrote down quite a bit. At the end of the day, Albans took the book from her, directing her attention up at the observation booth. They both stared up at Channard.

"Well?" Channard asked that evening, holding out his hand for the composition book.  
"I told her you'd want to look it over." Tyto offered it to him. "We'll need it back."

Channard read, silently. He'd been expecting something profound, or some sort of confession, or perhaps even alchemical formulae or a map to the lost city of Atlantis. Anything except poetry.

_Father my Father, come fetch me soon  
It's under the earth I am.  
Sister my Sister catch me up soon  
For under the earth I am._

"Now why is it that I think these are your words," Channard said. The poem continued for several nonsensical verses, all tinged with yearning and begging and freedom deferred. Only a few lines were crossed out. Medea's penmanship was square and neat as type. "If you'd begun to learn to read and write when I asked, you wouldn't need her to play secretary."

"I have plenty of time to learn for myself later. This is for her. They're not just my words. They're hers as much as mine. She tells me the story and I tell it back to her. Somewhere between us both, we find the right words."

_Brother my Brother, my mind has gone wild.  
It's under the earth I am.  
My lover, my lover where is our child?  
It's under the earth we've gone._

_It's only forever  
until we are found  
with the lost and lonely.  
We're underground._

Tyto hummed a run of four notes as Channard read the last lines, the words working in his head to the rhythm of the music. The words fit, and the final note was uplifted, as if to question, or to imply hope. Channard flipped through the rest of the blank pages and tossed the whole back across the desk to Albans.

"Hold out your arm," Channard said. "I'm putting you on a regular course of sedation. Evening and morning, do you hear me?" But he felt disquieted, and not even making Albans submit could soothe that uneasiness. Albans complied, not even meekly, but as if the steel needle and the morphia compound couldn't touch him at all. He was still humming a skirl of notes which devolved in places to snatches of the poetry sung under his breath, even when Channard closed on him.

On the eighth and ninth days, she became his handmaiden again, or as if their roles were once again reversed, her leading, he following. The sedative compound made Albans wild for a few minutes before it took effect, and he came to the common room dazed and worn out. It was Medea's turn to support him, to lead him to their intimate corner, to sit and be near him until he unfroze and stopped treating his body like an experimental machine. By midmorning, Albans seemed thawed, and when Medea spoke to him, he was able to speak back, but with long pauses and sometimes with heaving breaths or stutters. By the afternoon, he could speak to her the way they had the day before, and they wrote together. Channard reviewed their literary works in the evening. They seemed to be writing some sort of story together, made up of poetry and soliloquies. Pages of the composition book were ripped out and folded in, as well as pieces of loose paper that had once been the duty roster or the backs of old memos taken from the corkboard.

It was difficult to sort out the characters—it seemed to be about a Queen whose child, or perhaps whose husband, and sometimes both together, had been stolen away to the Underworld by a wicked Goblin King who was sometimes also benevolent and kind. The parts kept shifting, and it was difficult to track which speeches belonged to which part, or sometimes if it was even a part at all. But what seemed clear in the story, which Channard rolled his eyes to discover, that Medea was, with Albans' help, writing the story of her life in which she hadn't murdered her child at all. She was a foil for Meander's Queen, searching the Labyrinth for a child—and sometimes a husband—which had been stolen. He didn't even bother to make notes. It was the negative confession of Medea's guilty conscience. Albans' cure, if this story was meant to be the cure, was to help her tell a story in which she evaded all responsibility for her sins.

* * *

On the tenth day, the Radamanthus Asylum had visitors.

Channard had expected Kline to call in a favor for their long-ago meeting together, and was slightly nervous. But it was only a group of Triptoleme University students, in their third year, that Kline begged access for. They were theater students, wanting to examine the madhouse for inspiration for some play. Three of them caught his attention in particular—the blond boy, Jeremy, the dark-haired Linda, and their guardian shadow, Robert.

"What play is it again?" Channard asked Jeremy, after introducing himself and outlining protocol for visiting the common room.

"Marat/Sade," he said, smiling. "It's very modern. It's set in a madhouse, with all the inmates putting on a play written by the Marquis de Sade about the death of Jean-Paul Marat."

He ushered the group of eight into the common room but kept up the conversation with the interesting triad.

"We're trying to really evoke the feeling of madness and rage of the eighteenth-century asylum," said Linda. "The Marquis de Sade—he's fascinating. Jeremy's going to be marvelous in the part." She clasped the hand of her object of obsession and moved away into the room with him. Channard smiled and turned to the third wheel.

"And you, Mr. Williams? Are you also in the performing arts?"

Robert blushed. "No. I'm just here with Linda. Second year, specializing in family law." He looked around. Channard found him very easy to read. Robert Williams was a cautious, insensitive, honest man. He was here to follow the graceful Linda the way that Channard was here to follow Tyto. "I don't have much experience with mental illness. But this place is surprisingly pleasant."

"For a madhouse, you mean?" Channard smiled and was gratified to see Robert blush again. "No, I don't take offense. Discipline and routine, that's the best regimen."

Robert, watching Linda, saw Linda watching Jeremy, who was watching Channard's pet creature. Williams followed the train of eyes until he looked beyond Tyto Albans, who was holding magnificent court on his paired couch, and at the figure all in cobweb white at his side. "Is that woman… is she pregnant?"

"Yes," said Channard, irritated. "Sad to say, it's difficult to hold lunatics to basic standards of human decency. And medically treating her is more complicated. I'm attempting alternative methods. The baby will need to be placed for adoption, which is even more complicated."

"Is it his? That man's?" Robert was staring his dislike at Tyto Albans.

Channard discovered his own face held the same expression. "No," Channard said. "She's almost seven months along, and he's only been here since August." Of course it was obvious, by a thousand silent signals, that the Prince Owl and Princess Medea were a matched pair. He, pale in his dark motley and she dark in her white. They sat together on their couch, not touching, but together, like royalty granting an audience to Channard and his gaggle-trail of young theater idiots. Williams moved forward more quickly as Linda and Jeremy approached the couple, and Channard had to stretch his legs to keep up.

"Is he dangerous?" Robert asked, tense.

"Only to himself. He's been mildly sedated. Although you should be polite when you speak to him. And don't touch her," Channard cautioned. "He's very protective of her."

A little of the tension vanished from Robert's face. "I can understand that."

Jeremy and Linda had reached the couch where Tyto and Medea received waited to receive them. They looked each over carefully. The two couples, two fair-haired men and two dark-haired women, made a four-pointed star. By the time Channard and Robert had reached them, they'd apparently already exchanged introductions. Out of the corner of his eye, Channard observed the other five students circulating around the room, watching and mimicking the gestures and poses of the insane until it seemed there was little difference between them.

"Oh, look at it, by all means." Tyto was saying to Jeremy as Channard and Robert approached, waving his hand over the notebook on the coffee table. He seemed bored by the prospect.

Jeremy took it up eagerly. He read with fascination. "Goblin City," he scoffed merrily, and paused at the blocked lines of poetry-speeches. "What is it, seems like Demeter's quest. But that was Hades, not the Goblin King. What's… wow. You know, this could almost be a play. All the pieces are there."

"Jeremy, give him his book back."

"No, listen to this, Robert." Jeremy struck a heroic pose, holding the notebook back from his face, and declaimed,

"Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered  
I have fought my way here to the Castle-Beyond-the-Goblin-City,  
To take back the child that you have stolen.  
For my will is as strong as yours,  
and my kingdom is as great."

He stared at Tyto Albans with hauteur, waiting for the next line. Tyto stared back at him, in a pose more genuine, more regal than the one the young man had only pretended at.

"You have no power over me," Tyto said. But in the moment he said it, it looked as though a great and crushing weight had settled over his shoulders. He said the line to Channard, and while the words held defiance, Tyto's voice, and eyes, held the sour note of defeat.

"You have no power over me," Jeremy intoned carefully, reading the line. "Seems a bit contrived," he said, frowning at the text. "Still… it's good." He leafed through a few more pages, catching out some bits and scraps of loose paper notes jumbled in with it. "Lots of unsorted mythological themes. Meander's Queen trying to rescue her husband and their child from the Underground Kingdom. Interesting take on the whole Persephone thing. Could I keep it?"

"You can have it after Robert is done with it," Albans said. "It's for him. And for Linda. You come after."

"I don't really…" Robert looked embarrassed.

"No," Albans said firmly. "I insist. It would be a great personal kindness if you would take it. Only… make sure the author's name is on it. Maryam Robin Billings. Maiden name Zakar." He handed Robert a pen. Robert took the book from Jeremy, who seemed reluctant to part with it, and wrote the name.

"These too," Albans said, handing a sheaf of folded ink-scribbled loose pages to him. "The most important pieces are right there."

A sudden commotion over by the doors caught Channard's attention, and he excused himself to deal with the problem. He saw, on his return, that Robert had looked over the white papers and put them into his jacket pocket, saw him thank Tyto Albans—and Medea—for their gift. There was a strange expression on Robert's face. He looked dazed and determined, and his thanks were hesitant and intimidated as he pressed the notebook to his chest. Robert's eyes skittered to Tyto's face and to Medea's.

"Our time together is over," Tyto Albans declared. "I'm sure if you read it carefully, you'll understand your part." And he stood, shaky on his feet, and offered Robert his hand, who shook it.

"Yes," said Robert. "Thank you. We'll be on our way now."

"Robby," Linda whined, "We haven't seen nearly enough. We can't go yet."

"We're leaving now," Robert insisted, taking her arm with some strength. "Jeremy. Get the rest of them. Five minutes. Anyone who stays misses their ride."

Channard was glad to see the back of them. And Tyto and Medea—or Maryam Billings, or Robin Zakar, or whatever new sobriquet Albans had decided to bestow on her—sat together quiet and still, as if all their purpose and all their will had left with their words on the page.


	11. The Prisoner in the Box II

_(Author's note: italicized lines are from Shakespeare's _Tempest_, Prospero in a speech to Caliban.)_

On the eleventh day, Channard stayed home, overseeing some improvements to his house.

Not much, only the lining of his bedroom closet with panels of iron. The workmen were efficient; Channard's specifications had been exact. When they had left, he stood inside and burned a willow-withy and a nosegay of red and black marigolds and painted the seams and rivets with their smoke and ash.

He wasn't sure how, yet, but he trusted his star. Albans would come, and he would keep him here—away from anyone who would try to steal his attention. And when his will had proven sufficiently broken—Channard looked over to the steel shackle on the chain that he himself had bolted to the foot of his iron bedframe.

He imagined all the acrobatic varieties of abasement that he would watch Tyto Albans perform here.

But when his mind was clear of the frenzy of lust, when he allowed himself to see clearly what he'd imagined, he felt… strange. Somehow, in his unguarded fantasies, he had imagined something completely different. A different flavor, a different way. He had subconsciously pictured scenes of domestic tranquility. He imagined Tyto clasping his waist fondly as he stood at the stove, scrambling eggs. Or him sitting comfortably close under his arm as he read to him from books. Or laughter, clean laughter together with no malice or irony. Not steel boxes and chains. None of that. Channard ran his hands through his hair. He slammed the newly heavy closet door shut. Seven bolts waited to be thrown. The door swung back open under its own weight. It struck him in the chest, struck the amulet he wore in his inner breast pocket. The brass barbs pricked him, the first pricklings of conscience he could remember feeling in his adult life.

What would Albans have done, or said to him, if Channard had done the only thing Albans had ever asked of him? If Channard had let his hand rise as it had wanted to do the first time they spoke together, and turn the key into the lock, setting him free?

_He would have flown away, glad to be gone_, Channard mused. _He knew me exact in the moment he saw me, just as I knew him for what he was. He would have run, far and long, and been gone in the space of a breath. He would have found someone else to test himself against._

_I'm only his equal while I'm his torturer_. Channard clasped his hand tight, tight around the fold of cloth that held the amulet. _He only wants pain from me. He thinks I don't have anything else worth giving._ What had he said? _Heights, transcendent heights of lust and pride_. That was all Albans wanted from him, to watch him perform pride and lust for him. Was that what Albans had come to learn from the human world? Channard somehow doubted that among Tyto's obscure people pride and lust were undiscovered qualities. It had been something else that Tyto Albans had come to discover. Perhaps only his own strength in the face of a lust and a pride that daunted his own. But no, he'd said he was the tax, the Tiend. What had his people thought to buy with the currency of themselves?

_He wouldn't have stayed if I didn't have what he needed_. The pain he felt was intense. Albans needed him to be an idol of Hate. The ritual of Hate-worship was something Channard had helped him pursue, diligent as any faithful priest.

_I wish it had been Love_. Channard breathed out, not quite stifling a moan of despair, as he allowed himself his secret wish. Never once, not once in his life, had anyone ever loved him the way he wanted, needed to be loved. He desired it, the clasping of hands and hearts and bodies. All of his postgraduate sexual encounters had been bought and paid for, and been tepid and perfunctory as blowing his nose. Sex had been tainted by the paranoia of being caught out, disgraced, ruined. He had never been allowed even the hope of that kind of love. Then Albans had come into his life like a miracle, a creature without shame or propriety, outside the rules and laws that had made even acknowledging Channard's inclinations a frightful danger. He'd never been given another man's kiss, or his flesh, or his regard without it being paid for in money and terrible risk. Except with Albans, and he had stolen all three from his prisoner.

He drew the amulet out and looked at it, touching it the way he wished Albans would touch him, the way he'd touched Maryam Billings. Tyto still wanted this thing, wanted it as badly as if it were his heart, externalized. He'd stolen this too, but hadn't been able to steal Albans' heart. Better to crush than to woo. Better to steal than to beg.

He'd stolen because he had always been afraid to ask.

"You would never have given me anything, you son of a bitch!" Channard shouted. His voice echoed off the metal in the closet. "You never would!"

Channard squeezed, and squeezed, so that the sharp edges of the amulet ground into his palm.

_Thou most lying slave, whom stripes may move, not kindness!_

He had the means to draw stripes on that pale flesh, yes, with crops and canes and wands of iron and ash. The amulet gave off a whisper under his crushing hand, a whimper of pain in Albans' voice.

He didn't see any way out of this for himself. Lust and pride, that was all he had to offer that was any worth. Albans would laugh at him if he tried to ask for more; he had laughed when Channard begged for love. He would never, ever love him the way Channard truly wanted. He wanted to be tender. He wanted to be vulnerable, and he wanted to be those things without fear. Tyto Albans had promised his submission, but not his love. The only way to capture a shadow of love was by torture, pain, domestication.

He stared inside the iron box.

He saw himself there.

They were bound together on this path. They'd gone into this labyrinth together and there was beginning again. Channard would have to find the strength to see it through, to whatever end. The amulet cried out again under Channard's hand. He slapped it to the bedside table, picked up a hammer, and dealt it a terrible blow that cracked the golden spiral in two bleeding pieces.


	12. Fenestral

(_**Author's note**__: a fenestral is the upper opening of a medieval window, sometimes covered with paper. It can also refer to an upper window built for owls in old barns._)

"Doctor!" Hobart and two of the other orderlies, plus a guard, plus the night duty nurse, and a man in a brown suit that Channard couldn't immediately place pounced on him the moment he came through the doors. He saw fear and shame in their faces. He knew. Somehow he knew.

"He's gone, Doctor."

Channard took off his coat and folded it across his arm. He patted his breast pocket, where Tyto's amulet oozed blood into a gauze dressing. Still there. Thank God, still there. He closed his eyes, very slowly. Very slowly. Let him live in that darkness behind his eyes. "What do you mean, he's gone? Who's gone?"

"The fairy," Hobart said. "We were doing count this morning and he weren't there no more." Channard blinked and remembered that the word meant something different to Hobart and the lowbrow staff than it did to him.

"Tyto Albans," Channard said. "How?"

"We don't know. He musta got his hands on a key somewhere. His door's open, the hall doors open, it's like he just walked out!"

"Have the police been notified?"

"Course, Doc, first thing."

"All right," Channard sighed. "I'll do some followup today. Please, everybody, go back to your regular routines. Has his room been touched?"

"No, Doctor, we figured you'd wanna look. There's a mess in there."

"Leave it until tomorrow, then. I'll get to it by and by."

He realized, walking through the doors and down the hall to his office, that he was in shock. Hobart and the strange man were following him. "Doctor Channard," one or the other of them said, but Channard didn't care which. He unlocked his office door, unlocked his desk, and took out the bottle of brandy he kept there for emergencies. His hands shook; glass clanked against glass to the rhythm of his heart. _Gone. Gone. How had he managed? How? How? Take that drink._

Keys in the bottom drawer. Jones' keyring.

In his imagination, he pictured Albans in the empty showers, opening the orderly neatly with one angry swipe of the arm, and then peacefully going through Jones' ring, finding the key, the master key, the one that opened all doors except the one to Channard's office, and concealing it. And then, posing at being caught with the ring, being caught testing keys, showing Channard and anyone else who cared to look just exactly how he'd done it. The magician says _Watch me move here and here, don't see me move there, and there._ Chanard lifted up the keyring, matched it against his own. One empty space where the master key ought to have been.

Had he taken his woman with him?

"Hobart!" Channard bellowed. "Get in here!"

Glass. Brandy. The alcohol beginning to work, though he might need a stronger sedative if his fingers wouldn't stop shaking. He put them both away, inserted a peppermint pastille to kill the fumes on his breath. God knew he had cause, if anyone noticed.

"Doc, there's this—"

"Is Maryam Billings still here?"

"—guy to see you from… yeah, she's still here. We checked soon as we saw he'd gone."

"Good." His mind, clumsy, fumbled for a means to negotiate. Medea was still here. Albans had entered into a bargain for her freedom. Thirteen days. This was only the … only the twelfth day. There was still time. He could put her back on the electroshock couch. He could take the skewer to her brain. He could break her mind so completely that she'd never resemble anything human ever again. Tyto had apparently loved his freedom more than his woman. And he'd lost. He'd be drawn back to Channard by the bonds of their covenant. Robin Zakar would remain Medea, and a slave to madness., and Tyto Albans would have to return to Channard, and serve him. There was still a way to win.

"Doctor Channard!" He realized that Hobart had said his name at least twice.

"What?"

"There's a man from Judge Hech's office to see you. Says it's important."

"Fine. Thank you, Herbert."

"Hobart."

"Whatever. Send him in." He had to get rid of whoever it was. There were things to do, plans to make. He needed to get out of this blind alley. he needed to think. He needed time.

A strong hand rapped at his opened door.

"Doctor Channard?" asked the man in the brown suit. Channard realized he knew him. It was one of the theater students. _Weyland? Williams. Robert Williams._

"Ah, Robert Williams. Come in. Sit. I'm afraid I can only give you a quarter-of-an-hour, we've had some problems this morning."

"I know. I heard. This won't take long." Williams didn't sit, but he put his briefcase down on Channard's desk. Expensive leather. Judge Hech's office? _Second year law student_.

"What can I do for you?"

"I'm here to have you sign Maryam Billings' release order."

Channard almost laughed at this perfect counterpoint to his woe. _That's nothing_, said the magician. _See me do more. See my next trick. Feed me on your awe._

"Working on a Sunday, Mr. Williams? That's very industrious of you. So you'd be Katie Hech's..."

"I've clerked for Judge Hech for two years. She's been very helpful. I'm glad I caught you in. Judge Hech wants this matter resolved today."

"Why would I sign a release order for Maryam Billings?" Channard asked, dryly.

"Because she's innocent." Robert, looking at his briefcase, pulled out a series of items and laying them on Channard's desk. Channard wanted to stand, but his legs felt weak.

"There's a dead baby and a husband who say otherwise."

"Well, that's the heart of the matter, Dr. Channard. They actually say the opposite." Williams tossed a folded transcript out on the desk. "Read that."

He scanned it quickly. There wasn't much to it.

**CHARLES BILLINGS: (CRYING) I knew the baby wasn't mine. I saw it. It wasn't mine. I knew who it belonged to. It was Jared Smith's, had to be. I could smell him in the house sometimes. I went and called him over and I stabbed him and buried him in the compost heap. He's still there, stinking. I thought I could hear him the day before—he asked me "Where's Robin? Charles, where's my Robin gone? Where's our baby?" He was all bones and teeth.**

**OFFICER LINK: What happened to the baby?**

**CHARLES BILLINGS: I killed it. I killed it and blamed her. God, give me some morphine! The pain! (CONVULSIONS) She's innocent. I did it. It was me. I did it all. (WHISPER) I don't want to go to hell. Set her free. I did it all.**

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Deathbed confession," Robert said quietly. "Given about three months ago. Billings had some sort of accident. Cut his belly open with a kitchen knife. It could have been a suicide attempt. Maybe he meant to take his secrets to the grave. Fortunately, he had a last-minute change of heart. Sam Link was there and got the confession. He just never filed it. He went on medical leave the next day, injured on the job."

_Officer Link_. He knew that name. Channard's eyes widened slightly. "Let me guess. A tear in his basilic vein, or a broken arm, after an altercation with a suspect resisting arrest."

"I don't know his personal history. I just thought Billings might know something. The report was there, waiting for me to ask for it. All I needed was a reason to look."

Channard noted the time of death. Billings had received extreme unction following his confession and died twenty minutes later. Flipping the page, he saw Maryam Robin Zakar Billings' discharge papers, sent down directly from Judge Hech's desk, asking—demanding—only his signature and Robin Zakar's.

He rubbed the bridge of his forehead. "It's not enough," Channard said. "Too flimsy. Billings could have been lying, misplaced conscience. How do you know he wasn't trying to offer the woman he loved her chance at freedom? He was obviously under some mental duress."

"Well, the body we discovered buried in his back yard is pretty compelling evidence. But I knew what to ask for and what to look at from the woman herself. Because of this." Robert pulled out the composition notebook, the story of Meander's Queen, the hodgepodge of notes and folded-in pages.

"Delusion!" Channard said. "That's all delusion and nonsense. It's a story they made together, nothing more. It's make-believe. It's junk."

"Well, your writing is in here too." Robert picked out one sheaf of paper was different from the rest. It was the folded cluster of notes that Tyto had put directly into Robert's hands. "This is _not_ junk." Robert tossed it to Channard's desk. "Her medical file. Or should I say, _your_ medical file, since it belongs to the Radamanthus Asylum. Look on page two."

_Maryam Billings' medical file. How…_

_"How would you like to learn my magic?... Let me demonstrate. With your permission, of course."_ The wind. The door. The fae king's servants came to make wrack and ruin of his office. Maryam Billings' file had been open on his desk.

He saw, in his mind's eye, how he'd been distracted, his attention turned away from Tyto Albans for just one moment. He imagined one of the horrid creatures from the labyrinth snatching the papers from his desk and handing them to Albans who, neat as a prestidigitator, tucked them into a fold of his robe. He saw how he hadn't seen, hadn't known. Then he'd concealed them in plain sight for days, a needle hidden in a pile of needles, white paper hidden with white paper, and lined paper. Until Robert came, and was allowed to see and know exactly where to look. _The pledge, the turn, the prestige_, murmured the magician. _A round of applause for my lovely assistants!_

Channard looked. Her entire case file at Radamanthus was here. He flipped through it. His signature was penned in neatly over his typed name.

His _full_ name. He felt a stab of fear. But then, Tyto couldn't read. Unless—Robert cleared his throat, and Channard put the matter of his name away for later. There was already enough to worry about.

There was a three-pointed star drawn around a notation of Maryam's medical history. Three letters following the notation of the autopsy of an eight-month-old baby. "Neg." under race. _Negative? Neg. Naught_. "…Negro," Channard breathed. "The baby was negro?"

"Charles Billings is white. That's in the case file too. And the blood type doesn't match, either."

"So you jumped to the conclusion that Billings murdered the baby because he doubted his paternity."

"Not jumped. That's what he _did_. And he blamed his wife for it. Haven't you been listening? There's no room for doubt." Robert Williams frowned in mild anger. "I thought before, Dr. Channard, that you were just overworked. The clues are there. It just needed someone to put the pieces together. I thought maybe you just hadn't seen them, with so many other patients. But now I think you knew all the time. There's something… happening here. Something… uncanny and dark. I can't quite figure it out yet, but I think I could, given enough time. I'll have lots of time to think and sort it out if you won't sign that release."

Channard knew then that he was beaten. Or at least, this avenue back had been cut off. He'd lost this part of the game. He picked up his pen—fingers no longer trembling, thank God for small favors—and signed. But he held onto the paper before giving it over, looking Robert in the face.

"You know where he is, don't you? He came to you last night. He told you exactly how to speak to me, and exactly what to say."

Robert Williams' face was very still, and Channard found he couldn't read it at all. When Robert spoke, it was very carefully. "When we met here, he said I was to take the book and read it, and then give it to Linda and Jeremy. They'll turn it all into some pretty bit of fluff and nonsense. I don't really care about the book. What I do care about is the true author. She goes free. You'll never bother her or her baby ever again. I'll see to that. Don't think I won't."

"Didn't you ever think, Mr. Williams, that maybe it still is all a fairy tale? Maybe Maryam Billings really did kill her baby and it's this—all _this_—" Channard threw her medical file over Williams' briefcase "that all _this_ is the story? That he bent reality, re-ordered time, made the story into the truth? Don't you know what he can _do_?" Channard came around his desk and grabbed Robert's arms. "What did he _give_ you?" Channard sputtered, shaking him. "Did he give you Linda? For seven years and seven days? A love-spell? Your heart's desire? What did he _offer_ you?"

He frowned at his hands with an expression that Channard couldn't place, and then knew it as one of his own: the mix of incredulous disgust when he realized a patient was not only insane, but stupid. Channard dropped his hands, embarrassed by his outburst. He needed another drink. Perhaps a mild sedative to calm his nerves.

"He's dangerous," Channard spat. "I hope you understand that."

"Yes," said Robert, putting all the papers but for Maryam's case file back in his briefcase. "I know that. Do you?"

"And she's still crazy!" Channard yelled at Robert Williams' back. Robert turned, and finally showed his anger.

"Only according to you, Dr. Channard. Not to anyone who _matters_." Roberts turned away again, speaking his words to the hall. "I'll have your attendant take me to her for her signature, and I'll be escorting her out after that. Good-bye, Dr. Channard."

* * *

Albans' cell was dark and silent as the Gethsemane garden after the gathering in the upper room. There was no mark of Tyto except for a strange item in the corner. Channard flicked the light on and moved to it. It smelled of old come, turned peaches, and sick. Channard used a pen to pick apart the mess. Dessicated, jellied pemmican. Unused material: scraps of paper, lint and thread, a paperclip, bound together with clotted strands of dark hair. The impression in the mess of the brass key: the master key.

"Owl pellet," Channard said out loud. Tyto Alba, the barn owl, ate the mouse entire and then regurgitated a velvet pellet of skin and hair and bone, whatever it couldn't digest.

_My choice_, he heard the magician say. _See me chained in the box? But I've always had the key. Close the drape and open it; I will be free in the blink of an eye, just as soon as I empty my belly._

Channard turned the pellet over with his pen. Not that large; Tyto had left him the unused scraps of his magic, but surely there wasn't enough there to count for one peach, one act of passion. Tyto had taken in enough; he was still bound to the mortal world. Like Persephone, he would never escape entirely. He would have to come back.

He thought he heard the amulet laughing an insane laugh through its wad of cotton.

* * *

When he came home that evening, he knew someone had been in his house. He could smell Albans: that mix of dark amber and rain. He flicked on every light in the house, and made a show of investigating every room, although he was certain where he'd end up. His bedroom door was open.

Channard stared.

Something was hanging in the center of the iron closet, dangling from a rivet on a string of braided black and blond hair. He stepped closer, thinking for just one moment that the pendant hanging there was the bleeding amulet he still carried in his pocket.

It was Jones' key. The master key.

Tyto had come here, slid into his house, and left him a message. It wasn't over yet between them. Channard grabbed the key and the delicate string broke. He stared at it. It wasn't over yet. Albans was still bound to the mortal world, but he was free of Channard. And he wanted his amulet back. He was capable of doing anything to get it back. He wasn't _afraid_ of coming back to Channard; _he was looking forward to it._

Channard screamed in terror.

He threw himself into the iron box, held it shut with his fingers. _Good enough? Not good enough_. The door opened from the other side. _The bolts_. He threw the door open and scrambled through the house, terrified, mad. How much time did he have? He found what he wanted, scattering his garage worktable to chaos. _Drill. Hammer. Put the bolts on the inside. Sleep there_.

_For how long? Forever_?

"Shut up!" he said, working in desperate haste, working carelessly so that his fingers bled, until the locks were on the inside, where they needed to be. _Dark. So dark in here. Sealed off. Safe? Never safe. Never safe again._ He threw the bolts closed and huddled there in the darkness, shaking, holding himself. Not even room to do more than curl up like a corpse or lean against a wall. He held the amulet against his chest like a shield. _So dark. So small. The fear_. The fear was very large in this small space.

He wouldn't sleep that night, or sleep well for a week of nights curled in his cage against the world.

It was a fortnight of bleakest Hell. Channard, in his later years, would remember it as the most powerful experience in his life, and also the most painful. In those two weeks, his terrified mind stripped and interrogated and tortured itself a thousand times in the night. He was only waiting for the judge to come and deliver the verdict upon him. He found that he was looking forward to this. He wanted this to be over. He wanted it with every beat of his haunted heart.

He was so afraid.

* * *

(**Author's note**: You don't think it ends here, do you? Of course it doesn't! The thirteenth and final chapter of this story follows. If you've gone this far, you're going to the end. And if you haven't written one yet, give this story a review. Thank you so much to those who already have-your attention and regard have made this story well worth the writing. I appreciate your feedback so much.)


	13. I Have Not Been to Oxford Town

_(__**Author's note**__: Lyrics here are modified versions of David Bowie's "Underground." The Prophet is a poetic opus by Kahlil Gibran. Readers are encouraged to look up Gibran's 1911 self-portrait in his Wikipedia entry and examine the curious figure standing behind the offered crystal. Final epigraphs are lyrics to "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town," from David Bowie's album _1. Outside_.__)__  
_

* * *

**November 1965**

Halloween was over, and the city streets belonged once more to the adults. Channard found himself compelled to get out of his house. He was suspicious of this impulse at first, but it seemed as though the fear was all in his box, and freedom outside. If he were to die, he would die. But he would give himself one last night of pleasure, one last flight of experience and self, and then sleep one last night in his own bed again. Let Tyto Albans come. He wanted one more taste of life before he died. It wouldn't matter how painful his death was, so long as he could have one last night of freedom. As he walked through the alleys, he heard the sound of music and laughter from the bars and nightclubs. It was adult laughter, happy but knowing and with a note of desperation—which suited his mood. Down in Minos alley, there was a club that served only men, a brick basement with broken particleboard over the windows. He heard the music there, the bright clarion pierce of a tenor saxophone, and a voice singing in low tones about the futility of love.

He knew that voice. That voice was why he'd come. It had called him out. It was Tyto Albans' voice.

In the club, credentials and passwords given and received, and couples danced and drank.

Tyto Albans was there, singing an ironic song about the faithlessness and cruelty of women in a range that moved from the high octaves of anguish to the low tones of consoling passion. He had exchanged his madhouse regalia for a grey suit and a black plastic trenchcoat. Wool gloves with the fingers cut out did nothing to hide his sharp hands on the microphone and everything to protect him from burning contact with the metal, but either the patrons weren't watching or they didn't care.

The same face, the same eyes. But he had aged, somehow—aged years in their half-month of separation. His pale hair fell down past his jaw, grey and rose-madder streaks in it like time and blood. Channard closed his eyes and let the song ring through him.

"Kahlil Gibran," Albans murmured into the microphone. "_The Prophet_." There were noises of approval from the crowd. This song, this singer, was known to them. Channard ordered a drink and held it in his hand, but couldn't drink.

"_When Love beckons to you, follow him_," the fae singer sang.

_Though his ways are hard and steep.  
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,  
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you._

_And when he speaks to you believe in him,_  
_Though his voice may shatter your dreams_  
_as the north wind lays waste the garden._

_For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you._  
_Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning._

_Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself._  
_He threshes you to make you naked._  
_He sifts you to free you from your husks._  
_He grinds you to whiteness._

_He kneads you until you are pliant;_  
_And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,_  
_that you may become sacred bread_  
_for God's sacred feast._

The dancers, the men, those that danced, looked in each others' eyes and held each other in their arms. Those who didn't dance looked at each other openly, with admiration and without fear.

Channard gasped for air. But he didn't believe in this song, and he could tell, with aching heart, that Tyto didn't believe in it either.

The song ended, with a reverent silence. All of them, even Channard, lifted their faces to the singer.

"Serious stuff," Albans said, and laughed. Around him, his acolytes, the club, laughed also. He turned his head, just a quarter-inch, and looked Channard in the face. _Yes_, those strange eyes said to him. _Yes, I know you are here_.

Tyto turned and said something to the band. The saxophone shrieked a warning and Prince Owl turned to face them all, brandishing his microphone like a staff, cradling the metal calyx like a lover, and began to sing.

_"Nothing can shame you._  
_ You'd best run away._  
_ An outward reflection, uh-uh_  
_ Knowing rejection."_

Channard shuddered. The song of the Prophet hadn't been for him, and this one was. He was being sent away from the sacred perimeter of the temple. That song that he wanted to listen to—he very much wanted to listen to—was turning in his stomach like bad food. He turned his steps to the street like a puppet. But not home, not to safety. He walked the city in the perimeter of Tyto Albans' music, unable to swim free of the vortex it made. He tread the spiral for hours.

He felt an arm slipped through his, and then they were walking together in step down the three-a.m. night. How cold it was! Cold and clear, the dead evening's rain running in the gutters, the bite of snow in the air. Albans' breath made fog in his peripheral vision.

"Thank you for coming out tonight," he heard him say, but didn't turn his face to look. "It saved me the trouble of coming to you."

"You're welcome," Channard said. Ah, this was easy and natural as breathing. He felt light as a bubble. "I bought a gun, but I didn't bring it. More the fool I."

"Yes." Tyto squeezed his hand fondly.

"So you took up with magicians. Musicians." He shook his head, hating his traitor tongue. But the slip was natural. What might Albans have become, or done, if he had served his time among the corruptible music and creativity of artists? _Magicians all_.

"Yes. They've been quite kind to me. But I suppose I'll be leaving them after tonight."

"To go be with Medea," Channard said grimly.

"Well, no." Tyto laughed, but the laugh was bitter. "She's forgotten all about me. She has the memory of her baby's true father and the true father's name. There's no space for me in that crowded brain. Though I suppose I'd hoped…" Albans trailed off.

"You'd hoped she would have been like Janet in the story of "Tam Lin." Wanting you and finding you and winning you at the crossroads on All Hallow's Eve. But she didn't. That's why you're still here. She could have given you a way out of this world that didn't involve me."

"Yes." Tyto stroked his arm, leaned his head on Channard's shoulder. "So many right answers from you tonight, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. Doctor Phillip _Neuland_ Channard. She _did_ do me the slight courtesy of reading me _your_ full name from her medical file. I have you in my power. I have your soul. Do you want me to hurt you now, or later?"

"Later, please," Channard said, like a man in love. He brushed his his cheek against the blond head on his arm. "Let's keep things friendly until the very end."

"Until the very end of our walk together. Yes." Albans wrapped Channard's arm around his shoulders, his cheap coat, and let him hold him as they walked together in the perfect November silence.

"But I have your name, too," Channard said. "That's what it is, isn't it? Your name, given form. I had it all this time and never knew how to use it. You could have left it behind if she'd given you a new one. Will the baby be … different? Are you going to stand _in loco parentis_? A fairy godfather?"

"No." Albans said, but it wasn't a negative, it was a denial of the question itself. "You lost that game. You'll never get to know. Please be a good loser, Doctor Phillip Neuland Channard." Channard gasped, felt the flail of Tyto's will scourge his heart. "Too tight?" Albans was solicitous, and tender. He clung sweetly to Channard's side even as he harrowed his soul. "Ah, well, you'll soon get used to it."

They walked like lovers with nothing to fear, from the garish alleys of the city to the very center, where there was a park on the green, a brook, and swans in the summer.

"Thirteen weeks," Channard said suddenly. "To the day since you came." They stood on the concrete path under a streetlight.

"I confess, you've surprised me with how much you've learned. Thank you for playing. We have some fabulous parting gifts for you." Albans dropped his arm and turned to stand before him. He assumed a ritual pose, very like that of Triptolemus in his golden chariot, one arm at the level of his breast, the other forearm up, showing the back of his hand, fingers pointing upward at the level of his face. "Phillip. We're at the end now. What would you have of me?"

"I want you—I want you to touch me. Touch me like you touched her. With love. Or give me—give me the love you wanted to give her. If I had that, I could die happy."

The shadows gathered around the hems of Tyto Albans' clothing. His head was a candleflame in the darkness.

"Touch you," Albans said softly, curiously. "Like this?" He stripped his gloves and laid his hand gently against the side of Channard's face, stroked his cheekbone, curved that touch around his ear and down the side of his neck. His touch was devastating.

"Phillip," Albans said softly, and moved his fingertips back up under Channard's neck so that he stretched his face upward, into the light, to please those fingers, to feel them fully. Channard's eyes were full of light, full of tears. _His name_. _The light. The sweetness_. "Listen to me, Phillip."

He tried to see, tried to reach out and grab him, but Albans evaded his grasp even as he continued to touch him.

"The act of discovery is, for you, like a rape. You like to rend what you find. You were a child who pinned butterflies to cardboard and cut up living animals. Adulthood has not improved you. Now you do your cutting in the open and think yourself very fine."

Channard heard the words but felt only his touch.

"Have you considered that discovery could be beautiful? That knowledge could open itself for you, like a flower, of itself? That all you need to risk is yourself? And you ask _me_ for love. I'm not God, I can't give you what isn't already there inside you. And you are so empty."

He breathed the power of Channard's name in his ear, brought him close. "You want the love I would have given her? _She broke my heart._ Love is a curse, but I still love her enough to send that curse away from her and let it land on you. Here's my pledge to my beloved. If you ever love someone else, you will be betrayed. If you ever love someone else, your beloved will love one the one who hates you. If you ever love someone else, it will signal the end of yourself and your utter ruin, body and soul. A _fig_ for love. A peach."

Now the pinions were so tight on his soul that Channard thought he would die of it. _Fill me_, he thought, _Kill me_, and Tyto's hands were on either side of his face, lips so close they tickled his mouth. He could feel the length of his body and the beating of his pulse against his, a second touch. Those eyes drank him in.

"You thought I was your prisoner. You thought I was your plaything. You pretended there were no witnesses. But you have been watched, and seen, weighed and known. It was a trial, Phillip, and I am the judge."

And that touch was gone.

"Please," Channard begged. "Please don't leave. Or make me die before I have to see you go."

Tyto shook his head and stepped deeper into the darkness. "First my verdicts, on your people and on you, Doctor Phillip Neuland Channard." Channard gasped in pain. He felt his soul pierced, but not pierced through. Not killed. _Not yet_. "It's a courageous thing to do, and dangerous, to compel the love of one of my people, or to compel our hatred. You have done the latter. You have done it thoroughly. And while I could vomit you up and forget you, I've decided that's not enough. I want you to find your way to my realm, where you can be dealt with as you've dealt with me. If that's to happen, the doors between our worlds must be opened. So the verdict on humanity is _yes_: they may have commerce with my people again. You will have your chance to enter the labyrinth. There will be many ways in, from now on.

"And when you come there—and you _will_ come there, as I have your name and nature and can draw you there the way blood is drawn to a blow—you will want me, and seek me, and need me, but you will never find me. My verdict on you, Doctor Phillip Neuland Channard, is the agony of enduring flesh and life, without hope of love or delight, ending in pain and bound by fear and madness. And you will live a long, long life. Now give me my amulet."

Channard reached into his breast pocket and held it out, unable to keep the sobs from coming. "Please," he begged, even as Albans hung the object around his neck, "Please… kill me instead." The arc of the metal fell precisely above Albans' heart. The bleeding gash healed itself. The spirals of gold moved and interlocked. "Please, I can't bear this!"

"No?" Albans stood further back in the shadows. A sudden wind brought down flakes of snow that glittered on the skin of his coat. The wind blew harder, flapping the tail of Tyto's coat up like wings. The amulet glowed on his breast. He took one step up, then another, until he was climbing an invisible spiral staircase. The snow fell harder, stinging Channard's eyes, but he strained to watch him for as long as he could.

But then he blinked. He looked for Tyto Albans again, but there was only an owl, flying up into the black approaching storm, his wingbeats a hammer on the nail of night.

_This is your shadow on my wall,_  
_ This is my flesh and blood,_  
_ This is what I could've been._

**The End.**

* * *

**Thank you for reading this story. Please, if you've survived the journey, leave me a review. Tell me what made you happy. Tell me what made you squick. Tell me what made you both. By Bog, I'm actually begging for your attention on bended knee. It feeds my soul. Give me your favorite line from each chapter. Shower me with the verbal tokens of your regard. Haven't I been marvelously cruel? Haven't I been beautifully generous?**

**Epilogue and Acknowledgements follow**.


	14. Epilogue, Notes, and Acknowledgements

**Epilogue: The Films Revisited.**

In Labyrinth, Jareth the Goblin King oversees Sarah Williams' rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. He is her opponent, her antagonist, her teacher and her judge. His ability to perform his role-with generosity and cruelty in setting the tests she must undergo-isn't something that is his by accident. It's a position of immense trust and power. This position isn't something one can inherit or receive by birthright. It must be earned or it's worthless. I looked at Labyrinth and I wondered what shape the ritual would take if it were Jareth undergoing the same sort of ritual that Sarah Williams does in her story, only a ritual appropriate to his (older) age and (fairy) nature. Jareth is watched and tormented by his human antagonist, just as Sarah is observed and bedeviled by Jareth in the film.

In Labyrinth, Jareth seems to be bored, spoiled, heartbroken, angry, and afraid. He seems obligated to perform the rite-of-passage for Sarah, but completely emotionally unready to assume his role. He teases Sarah. He sneers at her when she whines. When she insults his battered, glittery, hard-won kingdom by calling it a "piece of cake," and insults his office and the difficulty of the ritual, he becomes murderously angry with her. (There's no other way to justify The Cleaners—Jareth is angry enough to kill her, and the danger to her life is real.)

But in the final confrontation on the Escher stairway, Jareth is afraid of Sarah. He's played his role too well; he's in danger of becoming an appendage of her imagination. "I can't live within you," is the plaintive cry of a creature who wants to be more than a fairy-tale enemy who is defeated and buried. He doesn't want to be for Sarah what his own opponent was for him. He seems afraid of losing more than the game-he's afraid of losing his very substance and personality to this woman who was a child five minutes ago. This new woman is something he himself helped to make. And Jareth has made Sarah Williams very, very powerful.

One of the boons Sarah has earned during her rite of passage is the ability to exist in both worlds at once—what Joseph Campbell called "The Master of Two Worlds" in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It stands to reason, given tertiary evidence in Labyrinth, that Jareth, too, has the ability to exist in both worlds—but until Sarah Williams came to the Labyrinth, he'd refused to look at the human world for a long, long time, because of how much pain and anguish it caused him. I see him as a trauma survivor who is beginning to let go of his anguished rage.

Fans of horror classics will recognize Dr. Phillip Channard, of the Channard Institute, from Hellbound: Hellraiser II. In this story, Channard is a cold, fiftysomething ascetic, a brilliant neurosurgeon and psychoanalyst with an obsession with the occult. We first meet Channard as he's cutting into the brain of one of his patients, musing on the labyrinth. He says: "The mind is a labyrinth, ladies and gentlemen, a puzzle. And while the paths of the brain are plainly visible, its ways deceptively apparent, its destinations are unknown. Its secrets still secret. And, if we are honest, it is the lure of the labyrinth that draws us to our chosen field to unlock those secrets….We have to see, we have to know."

In this film, rather than pay his own price and undergo the rite of passage that every neophyte must face, Dr. Channard of Hellraiser II instead abducts and imprisons a young woman—just Sarah's age, just on that cusp between childhood and adulthood—and forces her to solve Lemarchand's Lament Configuration. This mysterious puzzle-box is a means to open doors to the supernatural Labyrinth which is, in this movie, a metaphor for Hell. Channard is quintessentially a coward who demands that others suffer for the things he wants. But as the head of the Order of the Gash says, as Channard enters the Labyrinth with a traitorous supernatural guide, "It is not hands that call us; it is desire." Channard's desire for the Labyrinth leads him to a place of utter defilement and transformation, where he loses his flesh and his mind to the rapacious Leviathan-god of that place.

Channard's punishment is so terrible—"Suffering…legendary, even in Hell"—that it has the mark of a destiny. I like to imagine that the film is only the final judgment on a damned man who well-earned the horrible things that happen to him in Hellbound. His long list of sins against man and fae and himself are past due for repayment. Channard is defiled and devoured in Hellbound, and the awful scraps of his lust, sadism, and will are finally utterly destroyed by the bond of mutual trust and love between the younger woman-child and her older protective friend. Love triumphs over fear and madness, and the prisoners of the Hellraiser Labyrinth are liberated by their powerful bond, the living and the dead together.

* * *

**Notes: Surprises Along the Way**

I was surprised that Channard was a homosexual. This caused me some consternation, because I worried that I was playing into that long-standing, dangerous, and cruel stereotype of the "evil homosexual." But I think that stereotype exists for a reason, though not the reasons that are generally given.

When a society forces a person to bury or subsume their natural and God-given birthright to love and be loved, that person can become sick and evil. If they internalize the message that they are evil for even thinking about fulfilling their basic human desires, they become evil. The 1960s, when this story was set, was a particularly terrible time to be homosexual in the United States. People had to live lives in secret, or forego living full lives altogether. In most states at that time, homosexuality was a criminal offense. Channard, if uncovered, would certainly have been stripped of his medical license. If his luck were very bad, he might have been forced to undergo reparative therapy in his own mental institution. I can't imagine the daily horror of such a life, but I can imagine how it might twist an intelligent and good man into a damnably evil creature.

The "box" that Channard dreams of keeping Tyto in is a closet for a reason. The closet is a prison, the closet is death. I want to live in a world where we don't make more Channards. The solution, naturally, is love: a compassion that makes no demands of the beloved. When Tyto sings to the other men at the secretive, underground gay nightclub, it's a blessing he's giving to the free expression of their sexuality. Those men represent a lost generation of gay culture; the shame and fear and hatred of homosexuality allowed AIDS to proliferate in the late '60s through the '80s. I'd like to think that I've managed to balance the scales there, without being politically correct or preachy.

Second, I was surprised that almost all the speaking parts in this story were for male characters and that female characters were tangential to the plot. Labyrinth is a story deeply embedded in female characters and feminine imagery, so it felt strange and sometimes inappropriate not to include more active female roles. Medea is a McGuffin, like Toby in the film: she is the ball in a game played between opposing (in this story, all-male) teams. Linda, Sarah's future mother, is a self-absorbed idiot. The lack of female agency really bothered me. But that's the way it is.

And the Bob-Ross happy-tree that came out of it was getting Robert Williams, Sarah's future dad (who has about seven lines in the movie) involved, and watching him be a hero. Robert is a shining example of heroic manhood in this story. He uses his God-given intelligence and empathy to help and comfort the people who need it. When he's able to right a wrong, he uses every tool at his disposal to do so. He's protective of the woman he loves, and protective of the weak and helpless-but never in a possessive way. His moral compass points true North. I can see in him the man who will let his oldest child be a disrespectful brat because that protective fantasy allows Sarah to love her mother, even though that mother, Linda, has obviously abandoned her daughter. Robert doesn't get a lot of love in fanfiction; he's sort of everything that the Goblin King (and Jeremy, Linda's lover) isn't. But there's virtue in him, and he is worthy, and I was really happy he had a role to play in the story.

* * *

_"What about Medea's baby?"_

"No."

_Not in this story, anyway._

* * *

**Acknowledgements: Sources that Made this Story Work**

1. Outside: album: "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town," and "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" official music video, David Bowie.  
Made in 1995, this music video … just watch it. It's horrifically grotesque. The whole album is rich in sonic and lyrical imagery, and was directly inspirational for the second half of this story.

American Horror Story II: Asylum  
If you enjoyed this story, you will love this series. Set in a 1960s asylum run by a sexually, emotionally, and intellectually repressed nun, AHS2 provided critical thematic visual elements (particularly the common room) which helped with mentally staging this story.

"As the World Falls Down," official music video, David Bowie  
In the official music video for this song, a man and a woman muse on pictures of each other. They never quite come together. It's very sad.

Katherine Briggs: The Fairies in Tradition and Literature  
I've anachronistically included this book among the ones Channard reviews in Chapter 5. Briggs' book is among the first to clearly theorize the relationship between faeries and demons or ghosts. (There is a relationship, but it's hard to define.) The text is absolutely brilliant. Among other things important to fae lore: the role and the power of True Names, the rituals involving bargains and exchanges between humans and fae, and the damaging power of Cold Iron when applied to fae flesh. I've tried to follow all the traditions.

Batman Begins/The Dark Knight/The Dark Knight Rises: Christopher Nolan  
Dr. Philip Channard is played by the excellent Kenneth Crantham in Hellbound: Hellraiser II. For this story, I needed to capture something of the character's coldness and intelligence but also demonstrate youthful vitality and masculine beauty. Cillian Murphy's portrayal of the Scarecrow, Dr. Jonathan Crane, provides a template for the younger Channard in this story.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II  
See Epilogue above. The image of the opening door in the green-painted office are taken directly from this movie. Not for the weak-stomached.

"Heroes." David Bowie  
"And the shame was on the other side." A defiant call to love and life against impossible odds.

Inside the Labyrinth. Documentary film.  
David Bowie's discussion of his character was invaluable in understanding Tyto Albans and Jareth. I'm on the fence as to whether Bowie is human, prehuman, transhuman, or fae. Whatever else he is, David Bowie is a gift.

Labyrinth  
Uses should be obvious, but in particular Jareth's amulet (which he wears in every single scene of the film) has some special importance, which I've tried to uncover in this story. Also, Jeremy's (or Robin Zakar's, if you've read the original script for Labyrinth) play, that Sarah toys with, is composed of various handwritten scenes on lined notebook paper. You can see this in the film if you go frame-by-frame. When I saw that, I had to punch the air with joy. Parts of what Sarah is playing with are obviously the authors' own original words. And there's the peach. I couldn't resist using the peach. It seemed like a particularly apt, particularly sexual, particularly cruel reference to make.

"Tam Lin" 39B, The Child Ballads  
One of a series of stories about a human woman in a (nonconsensual) relationship with a fairy knight. He begs her to save him from the Tiend, the Tax to Hell (human sacrifice) and to her credit, she is willing. It's an emotionally complicated story, and a good one. Required reading for anyone interested in fae lore.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare  
Prospero, the magician, draws his enemies into the labyrinth of magic created by the forbidden books which caused his exile and downfall in the first place. Prospero is a beast to the rightful witchborne god-blooded heir to the island. Prospero only finds forgiveness and homecoming in abjuring magic and setting his prisoners free. It's a smart lesson; pity Channard learned nothing from it.

"Underground" official music video, David Bowie.  
In this official music video, we see a humanized Goblin King singing in an underground nightclub and wandering dark and rainy streets, attempting to find some way back to his Labyrinth. Jareth's solution, unlike Albans', is to tear the skin of his flesh in two and walk away.

The Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People  
The lesson of "The Sparrow in the Hall" comes from this text, and is a foundational lesson on English-speaking Christian conceptions of the soul.

"The Width of a Circle."  
An early David Bowie song which describes a magical, sexual rite-of-passage with a monster who is also the neophyte. The song also contains a reference to Kahlil Gibran, an important poet in 1960s American counterculture, whose book The Prophet is excerpted in Chapter 13.

The Sacred Mysteries of Eleusis, under Crossed Keys  
The rites still persist, and maybe you are my Brother or Sister: you know what I owe you from this story. For the rest of you, even if you never have opportunity to partake of a rite of passage, you can learn more about them from Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, Herman Hesse's The Journey to the East, and Arnold van Gennep's The Rites of Passage. If you're very courageous, you can design and perform the rites for others. These rituals are so very necessary, and so very rare.

There are likely a number of sources I haven't remembered to credit. If there's something in here that originally belonged to someone else, remind me. It's theirs and not mine. It's all our stew, but I didn't provide the ingredients, I just cooked it. Thank you for sharing the meal with me.


End file.
